The Malinalco murals 4. St Augustine

This is the last of our posts on the Malinalco murals, more of an addendum really.
   As a major Augustinian priory it would be surprising if St Augustine, the founder of the Order, did not feature in the murals of the church and convento at Malinalco.  Although not prominently portrayed, he appears twice in the convento.

In the upper cloister, he is first seen kneeling arms crossed as a spectator in the Crucifixion scene. Voluminously robed in black, he wears his bishop's miter and clutches a crozier and staff. 

In the former prior's room, just beyond the upper cloister, we find a partial, retouched early mural of a bearded St. Augustine sheltering the members of his order, whose tonsured heads recede into the distance beneath his spreading cape. Again, he wears his bishop's miter but here holds a flaming torch.

text © 2018  Richard D. Perry.  images by the author and Robert Jackson 

The Malinalco murals 3: the Upper Cloister

This is the third of our posts on the convento murals of San Salvador Malinalco.  In our previous posts we described the frescoes of the entry portería and the lower cloister. Here we look at the less well known and preserved cycle of narrative murals to survive in the upper cloister.

The upper cloister frescoes

 

The entire upper cloister is ringed along the walks by bright red geometric dados and foliated grotesque friezes, and like the entrance portico, the vaults are bright with painted coffering in the style of Serlio.
   While any original murals along the corridor walls have been erased or painted over, eight narrative murals have survived in the corner niches extending into the lunettes formed by the ribbed vaults. 
The Passion murals
The eight corner murals are devoted to a cycle of scenes from Christ's Passion, arranged broadly in sequence in a counter clockwise direction starting from the top of the stairwell in the southeast corner.
   As with Passion mural cycles we have seen elsewhere, these are rendered in traditional warm grisaille tones with faded red and orange/ocher accents. Most, too, are notable for their dark backgrounds which serve to draw attention to the various figures. 
   Several of the murals are marked by the presence of kneeling friars and eminent saints including St. Augustine, and all the murals are framed by ornamental, painted red columns—probably a later addition. 

   Unfortunately, most of the frescoes are now only partial; some remain in poor condition while others are unevenly retouched. Despite this, the sequence and themes of most of the frescoes are clear, with one exception.

Key pre-Crucifixion scenes include the partial fresco of Christ washing the feet of his disciples (2) with a headless St. Nicholas of Tolentino kneeling on the right. This infrequent scene is also portrayed at Franciscan Huejotzingo and Dominican Cuilapan.

And a highly retouched Agony in the Garden (1) features stylized local topography in the landscape. This scene includes the sleeping apostles—notably St. Peter with his machete! — and the figure of Christ echoed by a praying Augustinian? saint.

Then a Crucifixion (4) with the Three Marys and St. Augustine, set in an eerie landscape with celestial darkness and odd masked faces.

Next comes a partial Deposition (5) with St Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross and the partial figure of a cleric to the left. 
Then a similarly fragmentary Pietá (6) this time with St. Francis. 

The cycle is completed with a triumphant Resurrection (7). Christ rises from the tomb into the clouds raising the banner of Victory. Below two more kneeling friars flank a pair of falling Roman soldiers. 
The last scene of the Ascension (8) is almost entirely erased.

However, scene 3, located between Christ washing the feet of the disciples and the Crucifixion, is a puzzle. It depicts a kneeling, praying nun facing an unclothed but unmutilated figure of Christ seated sorrowfully above a large, burnt orange cross that spreads across the entire mural—its only colored element.

 

The iconography of the mural and its relation to the others in the cloister, are unclear. It has been thought to represent Christ contemplating his Crucifixion, which would be chronologically correct in the Passion sequence. However such a portrayal is rare, uncanonical and in fact unique in Mexican mural art.

God the Father surveys the scene from the upper left

Alternatively it might depict Mary Magdalene meeting Christ after the Crucifixion (Noli me Tangere) although this is out of sequence and the iconography is problematic. It might also conceivably portray St. Helen and the true cross, although again the iconography is unorthodox and out of keeping with the Passion theme. We welcome comments.

Unfortunately, the convento at Malinalco sustained damage during the September 2017 earthquake, especially in the vaulting of the upper cloister. No major effects on the murals have been reported.

text & graphics © 2018 Richard D. Perry

color images courtesy of Niccolò Brooker and Robert Jackson
* see Jeanette F. Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco.  Univ of Texas 1993

The Malinalco murals 2: the Paradise Garden Murals

From the portería at Malinalco it is only a few steps to the arcaded two story cloister. As with the entry portería, the walks are barrel-vaulted except for the corner compartments which are covered by Gothic ribbing.

Like the portico, the inner faces of the piers at one time bore painted portraits of Augustinian saints and martyrs, of which only two indistinct corner murals —a bishop and a friar—survive.  The only other distinctive remnant, in a side niche, is a painting of a friar confronting the Grim Reaper.

Painted in the 1570s and hidden beneath multiple coats of whitewash until the mid-1970s, the famous corridor murals are mostly well preserved, although those on the west side have been partly erased. Recent restoration has imparted a new brilliance to the frescoes that by some accounts may have obscured some of its original subtleties. 

The "Garden" murals
The corridor frescoes surround the lower cloister on all four sides, contained within broad, running friezes consisting of bands of foliated decoration.
   In traditional Augustinian style, these friezes enclose a long Latin inscription from the Psalm 84, spelled out in ornamental orange letters against a black background:

"My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young—a place near your altar, Lord Almighty, my King and my God.!
Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you. Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.! As they pass through the Valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs;!"

Cacti, with IHS medallions and rat

Boldly sketched in warm monochrome, leavened with accents of greenish-gray, the main murals constitute a continuous tapestry or frieze of twisting vines, trees, grasses and flowers featuring native American and Old World flora and fauna—birds, animals and insects—enveloping and linking large, armorial medallions of Augustinian insignia and intricate Christic and Marian monograms, which stand out from the floral background like mystical talismans.

Adam and Eve in a tree

Unlike most other Mexican cloister murals, with the exception of a miniature Adam and Eve, no human figures appear in the garden sequences, nor is there any other narrative theme.

"song scroll"

Although the design elements are drawn from Islamic and European graphic sources, the execution of the frescoes is indisputedly the work of native artists or tlacuilos, who were skillful observers of the natural world and who, almost fifty years after the conquest, still retained detailed knowledge of pre-hispanic customs and beliefs. In fact, the slotted "song scroll"—the telltale signature of the tlacuilo—appears at intervals in the murals on the vault. 

 
serpent, deer, rabbit and birds

  
coatimundi, feline and birds

Many of the native plants and animals shown certainly had special meaning for the indigenous viewer. Other significant symbols, perhaps unrecognized, may lurk amid the rich jungle of twisting foliage.

The Cloister Ceilings
Unlike the geometric designs above the portería and upper cloister, the ceilings here complement the wall frescoes, alive with restless, acanthus like foliage with varied blossoms and clusters of grapes. In contrast to the walls, no birds or animals appear although song scrolls are everywhere.

Predominantly painted in blue and orange tones—colors of important prehispanic significance—they are executed in a different hand, evincing a more indigenous approach with heavier outlining of objects and a writhing, almost abstract patterning of the foliage. 

Interpretations
Scholarly views of this unique mural program vary. The best known interpretation is that the murals represent and visualize the utopian Paradise Garden. This theme is reinforced by the inclusion of plants and animals that traditionally symbolized sin (serpents and monkeys) and redemption (butterflies and doves), reiterating the medieval monastic view of a civilized and Christian world in constant conflict with untrameled Nature and the disordered domain of the Devil.   
   Others view the exuberant profusion of native flora and fauna, at least covertly, as a joyous, even musical paean to the prehispanic world of the sacred, recreated in the Christian sphere.
   In another view, the frescoes imply the favored Augustinian theme of the Eremitic Life or Thebaida. This subject was rooted in their cenobitic origins and elaborated upon during their later expansion as an apostolic order. It extols the Christian message, conveyed by the friars to bring order and enlightenment to what they viewed as the vast pagan wilderness of the New World. 
   In any event, the visual superimposition of Christian and Augustinian emblems upon Nature implied that the imposition of such order and enlightenment was possible only through the Augustinian Order, a theme made more explicit in the portería. 
   The prominent display of Marian emblems embedded in the depictions of luxuriant nature, draws attention to another aspect of 16th century mendicant thought, in which the enclosed cloister also serves to symbolize the Hortus Conclusus, and by extension the inviolate nature of the Virgin Mary herself.

SOURCES:
Peterson, Jeanette,  The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-century Mexico, Austin, University of Texas, 1987.

Peterson, Jeanette “La flora y la fauna en los frescos de Malinalco: paraíso convergente” 

en Iconología y sociedad. Arte colonial hispanoamericano. XLV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, México, UNAM-IIE: 23-42 pp.  1987

Estrada de Gerlero, Elena Isabel, “Malinalco. Orígenes de su traza, convento y capillas”, en Malinalco, imágenes de un destino, México, Banca Cremi, 1989 

RUBIAL GARCÍA, ANTONIO,  Hortus eremitarum Las pinturas de tebaidas en los claustros agustinos

Wake, Eleanor,  Framing the Sacred  University of Oklahoma Press  2010

text © 2018 Richard D. Perry. color images courtesy of Robert Jackson and Carolyn Brown

The Malinalco murals 1: the Porteria

San Salvador Malinalco

The Augustinian priory of San Salvador Malinalco played a key role in the evangelizing and missionization of Michoacán and western Mexico. In the 1540s the Augustinians took over a humble Franciscan mission and began work on a new monastery using stone from demolished Aztec temples—a grand project only completed in the 1570s.

The imposing scale of the priory and its convento was matched by its murals, which covered almost every surface—walls, ceilings, doorways and niches. While some have been lost to time and neglect, a substantial remnant has survived and recently undergone extensive restoration.

The Portería murals 

Although the frescoed lower cloister is the star attraction at Malinalco, which we review in our next post, we begin our exploration of the murals with those in the entry portería.

   Blocked up and thus protected from the elements until recently, this arcaded entry of seven bays, has been newly restored. The vaulting displays a complex, geometrical artesonado design, painted in bright red hues and incorporating medallions displaying Augustinian insignia.

More significantly, the porteria murals immortalize the first seven apostolic Augustinians to arrive in Mexico in 1533. Originally, all seven friars were portrayed on the inner faces of the seven arcade piers, together with their names. 

Fray Agustín de La Coruña

Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz

Only two of these now partial portraits remain; one of them is of Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, "El Venerable," the leader of the first Augustinian contingent, and the other Fray Agustín de La Coruña, later Bishop of Popayan in Colombia. 

A dated inscription in Spanish describes the arrival of the Augustinians in Mexico and the founding of Malinalco: 

"These are the seven religious who came to preach the gospel in the year 1532, the Emperor Charles V being king and the Pope Clement the 7th and the General of our Order, Fr. Gabriel de Veneto, Provincial of Castile Fr. Francisco de Nieva and the Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza. This convento was founded in the year of 1543."

text and graphics © 2018 & 1992 Richard D. Perry. 

color photography by the author and online sources