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17.
The Picture That Outwits Science
IT MAY
BE DISPUTED whether the painting which Our Lady of Guadalupe did of
herself in Mexico should be called a work of art. The masterpiece exacted
of her no known effort, but seems to have resulted from a mere act of the
will that required no brush to impose upon the shabbiest base her lasting
image. Such power can only have come to the heavenly artist from Almighty
God, as had Peter's ability to cure the cripple at the temple gate. Her
self-portrait, in its origin, in its continuance, whether or not it should
be called a work of art, has every right from Providence to be called a
miracle. No other word covers the facts.
The tilma, which holds the miraculous
painting upon its poor and loosely knit material, measures four feet wide
and nearly seven feet long, its folds spread out full so as to reveal,
unwrinkled, the pictographic design. Now hanging over the altar of its
third shrine, and behind a glass covering, the painting for its first 116
years had no such protection. Uncovered, it had been left exposed to the
corrosive force of the salty Mexican climate and to the fumes from votive
candles burning constantly beneath it. However, it did not corrode. Nor
has it dimmed. The experts who have studied its perfect blendings marvel
that after four and a half centuries it retains a pristine luster and
retains this on a fabric that cannot naturally take paint and should
itself have long ago crumbled to dust. Skeptics who are not allowed by a
dogma of their own to consider the phenomenon a miracle must go away
without an explanation.
The Mexican who has no reverence for Our Lady
of Guadalupe is a rarity, if not an anomaly. Even the stray infidel takes
care not to ridicule her. He knows better than to offend the national
pride. For the people do feel it an honor to possess the world's one
painting done by a heavenly hand. They boast of it. They think of it in
no other term than miracle. And they believe it has a history to
match its origin. They are right.
The new wonders that science has been finding
in the self-portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, while they may surprise the
scientist, do not surprise the Mexican populace. The people hear of them,
if admiringly, yet unexcitedly. They have come to associate the
miraculous with the picture. They have grown so used to its miracles that
any new report of still another is taken with the confident attitude of
"Sure! What did you expect?" Our surprise amuses them.
It does not excite the natives that modern
photography has detected a seam running down the full length of the
picture, and that the face of the Holy Virgin is gracefully tilted aside
to avoid it. Showing through like a faint ridge to the magnifying lens,
it does not flaw the picture but only calls attention to the ingenuity of
the artist: to the handicap she overcame in laying her colors on so
unsuitable a base and must still overcome in getting them to stay on. It
does not, however, rouse the natives. A painting, known to have raised
the dead to life, does not become to them a greater prodigy because
science has divulged a lesser source of astonishment.
Tell the natives, further, that photography has
now discovered the clearcut figures of three men mirrored in the eyes of
the holy face, and tell it with as much enthusiasm as you can, the words
will not astound. A painting with the origin of this one, which has to
its credit many an unnatural cure and the resuscitation of a corpse, does
not need the help of science to instill esteem. The esteem is already
there. Nothing since its early achievement of mass conversions to the
Faith, which the picture by its meaning to him persuaded the primitive
Aztec to embrace, could deepen the national appreciation of the Dark
Virgin, the Holy Mother.
National pride saw to it that the painting
always had a sanctuary. It erected a succession of worthy shrines. If
the present one stands at the foot of Tepeyac Hill and not on the summit
where Juan Diego picked the miraculous roses, it is because its immediate
predecessor still occupies the preferred site and remains in use. But, of
course, it does not possess the painting. The original adobe building
after ninety years of possession gave up its treasure to this larger
second shrine on the hilltop, which in 1709 yielded the precious keepsake
to the much larger but now scarcely large enough basilica. An average of
15,000 people a day visit it. The pilgrimages keep coming, bigger than
ever.
The basilica, taking in an attendance in excess
of 5,000,000 a year, outdraws Lourdes. It rates second only to St.
Peter's in Rome as a religious centre of attraction. With the Villa de
Guadalupe grown up around it, tourists to Mexico City find it conveniently
accessible and no longer refer to it as "out in the country." They come
to it in bus loads. As for the natives who crowd into it, they in all
likelihood would have done the same before its present accessibility.
Their ancestors did, not minding the lack of transportation, walking miles
of dusty roads to the desire of their eyes. Difficulties they took in
stride. Acts of penance were their offering to the Holy Mother. The more
devoted natives to this day walk the last quarter mile on their knees.
It is the painting, not its accessibility, that
matters with the natives. Let an out-of-the-day barn obtain its
possession to show it off under the crude rafters, the crowds would be
there. It commands respect even from the small but hard core of
infidels. During the persecutions when priests were hounded into exile
and churches barricaded against the public, the apostates in government
did not molest the basilica. It intimidated them into a policy of hands
off. Not that they held the shrine in pious awe; infidelity does not
breed piety; but among the churches in Mexico this one escaped their
wrath. They respected its painting.
They knew the story behind it. They knew its
reputation for wonders inexplicable to science. None but a dunce in
Mexico remains uninformed of its very first miracle: how the corpse of an
Indian, carried in solemn procession to the picture, on the instant sat up
alive. More accurately, I suppose, that revival must be counted second.
The painting itself, as its colors blossomed out of nothing to cling to
the tilma, was its own first miracle.
Whether Our Lady fixed her self-portrayal to
the tilma after Juan Diego had carried the roses downhill to her
and she reached in to rearrange them, or later in the episcopal residence
after the roses had tumbled from the cloak, remains a conjectural point of
little import. Don Antonio Valeriano, an educated Indian so named at his
baptism and intimately acquainted with both visionaries, seemingly takes
for granted in his account that only after the roses had left the cloak
did the painting go on. No matter! The occurrence, not the exact time,
is what matters. That, and the unnatural durability of the picture. The
miracle of it continues.
The painting, from its place of honor over the
altar, still looks new. What the astonished bishop-elect and his
interpreter beheld on their knees, our generation may still behold. It is
all there as it was. The features and figure of the Holy Mother, her robe
of exquisite finish, the rays of the sun around her, the stars that adorn
her headcovering mantle, the crescent on which she stands, the angel
beneath, are of a rich and diversified blending of hues laid on the
unlikeliest base: yet the long wear of time has not tarnished, nor in any
way impaired, this evident work of heaven.
Of no other painting, submitted to so long a
test of time, may that be said. The Mona Lisa, a contemporary of
the Dark Virgin, shows on the whole area of the face a network of tiny
cracks, which a blown-up photo of it some years ago in Life
magazine clearly revealed. The most sensitive camera could find no such
flaw in the Guadalupe portrait, done though it was on the frailest maguey
cloth. The contrast is startling.
Of the two portraits, moreover, there is no
question which from the start enjoyed the better care. The Guadalupe
painting, at first not enclosed in a glass frame, had been touched by many
devout hands and taken the heat from many candles for more than a
century. The mistreatment made positively no difference to it; no more
than the fragility of its underlying support of cactus fibre; which means
none at all. The picture refuses to crack, refuses to crumble. It
presents an integrity without flaw.
It has passed with high honors the test of the
most exciting inspections. One of these occurred in 1963, the same year
that Life published its photo of the Leonardo masterpiece. On the
evening of April 20, by permission of the ecclesiastical authorities, the
Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe was closed to the public and would
remain closed through the night. The team of scientific experts, with
their few attending witnesses and reporters, had the church and the
picture to themselves.
First, Monsignor Gregorio Aquilar climbed the
steps to the scaffold where, as the sole keeper of the key, he unlocked
the painting's glass frame to swing it open on its hinges. This gave
supervisor Howard Earp of Portland, Oregon, the advantage of photographing
the picture unimpeded by the slightest obstruction. His camera, clicking
at such a close range under the glare of floodlights, revealed on its
plates the incredibly subtle tones of the colorful design. The technique
especially picked out the elusive rose tints in Our Lady's robe, and the
unearthly blue of her mantle. A printer from his own professional group
tested all the known shades of blue, which he had brought along in his
sample case, against the unique blue of that mantle. He found that the
whole spectrum of color from the repertoire of art had nothing to match
it.
No less unique is the deep gold of the
sun-rays, 120 of them, which break out in all directions from the blessed
figure. Only the stars and the embroidered fringe of the mantle, in their
shade of gold, may compare. The symphony of colors, including the touch
of pink in her tanned cheeks and the touch of brown in her dark hair,
befits the heavenly queen. It sets off to perfection the delicacy of her
features. It heightens the humanity of her sublime and prayerful young
face so as indeed to affect many a viewer to tears. In the words of
Belloc, who would surely have used them of this painting, "it is not of
this world."
The wonder of it all, however difficult for the
incredulous to accept, had to be believed. There was no choice. Cameras
do not lie. The close-ups did no more than enlarge to a sharper
discernibility what was there.
The cameras discovered still another source of
astonishment. Their lenses revealed a few pin holes in the mantle,
unnoticeable to the naked eye, through which could be seen the natural
color of the underlying fabric. And this is significant. In other
paintings the oil, or whatever else liquefies the pigmentation, is
absorbed by the foundational material. Here, on the contrary, the colors
lay on the maguey cloth without so much as staining it. As if the design
had been painted on air! Yet, beyond the power of science to explain, it
remains all of a piece, neither collapsing, nor dissolving.
But how does one account for those tiny holes?
How on earth did they happen? Time could not have worn them so. The
explanation may lie in the fact that on several known occasions, in its
earliest years, the unencased painting had had a flower pinned to it out
of devotion. The records show that it had even received the dedicatory
touch of a soldier's sword.
The 1963 team of inspectors returned to their
homes profoundly impressed. But not more so than any number of previous
examiners. Earlier studies of the eyes alone, in that devoutly beautiful
face of Our Lady, have astounded a long succession of optic experts. They
learned that her eyes hold quite a miracle of their own.
The studies began in 1929, with Alfonso Marcue
Gonzalez. Viewing the photographic negatives of the painting, he
discovered in the downward-looking eyes an unmistakable reflection of some
man. Twenty-two years later Carlos Salinas noticed in those downcast eyes
of the portrait the same reflected image. Of whom? Contemporary pictures
of Juan Diego, the visionary himself, proved the reflection beyond a doubt
to be his.
But Juan Diego, new developments would show,
did not have the distinction all to himself. Dr. Javier Torroello Bueno,
an oculist, discovered a plurality of figures mirrored on the cornea of
the miraculous eyes. He also found those eyes, unlike the eyes of any
natural portrait, holding the reflections exactly the way a pair of living
eyes reflect outside objects. To come by his findings, the eminent
technician had examined one enlarged photograph of the painting after
another. He finally publicized his observations in May of 1965.
In July of the same year Dr. Rafael Torija
Lavoignet, in confirming both observations, added to them certain details
of his own. Examining his photographs of the Dark Virgin, he
reduced Dr. Bueno's plurality of figures to three, while admitting there
could be more in the mirroring eyes. He further saw, peering into the
eyes through his ophthalmoscope and shifting its light around, that they
had the usual depth of real eyes. If they had not, he explained, they
could not reflect. "It is impossible," are his words, "to obtain such a
reflection from a flat and, what is more, dark surface." Yet, flat though
the whole surface of the painting is, the images are there in the
mysterious eyes. How does the denier of miracles explain it? Science has
no answer.
But the facts have been verified over and over
again. Dr. Charles J. Wahlig, O.D., who experimented with twenty-five
photographs of the Dark Virgin, agrees with Dr. Lavoignet: that the
eyes reflect the images of three men, Juan Diego and two unknown others.
An authority on optics, Dr. Frank T. Avignone of Columbia University gave
his endorsement. After all, seeing is believing.
Dr. Wahlig then set about to prove to the
skeptical that any normal pair of eyes could easily hold the reflections
of any three persons, under the right conditions. So he had a facial
close-up taken of his daughter Mary, but not until he and Mrs. Wahlig and
their other daughter Carol arranged themselves in a group before the girl
and looked straight at her as the camera clicked. The developed film
plainly shows their images mirrored in the girl's eyes. But the point is,
her eyes are alive—are those of the painting? Heaven knows.
The painting, a miracle in the way it came
about, has not done revealing to an incredulous world ever new dimensions
of its supernatural reality. The investigations continue. And they have
now reached the conclusion; that the other figures with Juan Diego,
showing in the miraculous eyes, are those of the bishop elect, Don Fray
Juan de Zumárraga, and his interpreter Juan Gonzalez. The Spanish
dignitary, who employed the bilinguist to facilitate his conversing with
the Indians in their language, presumably called him in to interpret
beyond any chance of error the message of Our Lady's emissary. But the
tilma, which Juan Diego then unfolded to their gaze, held a message
transcending the need of words.
The ecstasy on their faces at that moment, when
the two of them studied the handiwork the Mother of God had left on the
tilma in guarantee of her authenticity, remains reflected in the eyes
of her portrait. More distinctly still does the photographic enlargement
show the gaze of awe from Juan Diego, who saw the painting afterwards,
mirrored in its eyes. The three, so profoundly stirred, could not but
have read in those loving eyes the message from the Radiant Vision of
Tepeyac Hill: "I am your merciful mother, the merciful mother of all who
live united in this land, and of all mankind, of all those who have
confidence in me. Here I will pity their weeping, their sorrow, and will
remedy and alleviate all their many sufferings, necessities and
misfortunes."
There in the translated accents of the Aztec
language Our Lady has interpreted the meaning of just what her eyes, in
art's greatest painting, are saying better than words. They have been
saying it for centuries now; they never tire of saying it; and they say it
not alone to the responsive Mexicans. Those eyes have in them a universal
appeal, a capacious sympathy, that cannot be restricted to a single
nationality. Their artist put into them out of her maternal heart a
tenderness that embraces the world.
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