Mexico, 16th-century paintings resurface in a downtown church

After eighty years, in Mexico, in the temple of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in Santa María Huiramangaro, a town of just over two thousand inhabitants in the state of Michoacán, in the center of the country, an important 16th-century decorative cycle has resurfaced, wall paintings found following a restoration conducted by professionals from theINAH, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, with funds from Mexico’s Ministry of Culture made available through the Community Support Fund for the Restoration of Monuments and Artistic Heritage and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

“This project,” said Laura Elena Lelo de Larrea López, restorer at the INAH Michoacán Center and director of the work, “allowed us to recover an extraordinary work on the horizontal cover of the high altar and to uncover the rich artistic, technical and iconographic evolution that marked this religious site.” The intervention revealed a rich and colorful iconography with three overlapping pictorial layers. The oldest, from the 16th century, corresponds to the creation of the complex of images that, among others, depict the figures of Saints Peter and Paul, Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Agatha of Catania, and the Holy Family, with the Child Jesus wearing the Franciscan habit. The theme exalts the martyrs, giving an example of the lives of those early men and women who converted to Christianity and, at the moment of death, achieved divine salvation. The specialist explains that these figures, which crown the chancel of the Temple of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, constitute a cycle with the stories of the lives of saints rarely attested in the State of Michoacán, since the custom of decorating churches with these subjects had already faded in the seventeenth century, when themes related to the Virgin Mary, Christ or a particular saint were favored.

The images were concealed under a whitewash that dated back to the 1940s, when a general repainting of white paint was applied, with designs in blue , “a redecoration that caused the alteration of the appearance of the place,” explains Lelo de Larrea López. During the course of the work, the restorers in charge of the intervention, Joselia Cedeño Paredes and Gabriela Fernanda Contreras González, confirmed the existence of three different pictorial layers on the walls of the presbytery. The sixteenth-century layer is a tempera with which the characters were drawn, who were painted with thin glazes, visible in the haloes and background landscapes. In the next century, oil colors in bright tones, such as greens and oranges, were applied to the characters’ clothes to highlight their volumes. Then in the 20th century, acrylic paints were used to touch up the flesh tones and faces of the figures, which had been partially erased in earlier years. Largely respecting the initial 16th-century design, these repaintings had the primary intent of embellishing the ornamentation of the chancel.

Joselia Cedeño and Gabriela Contreras report that the attention to the planks and roof moldings involved several actions: cleaning of dust and bird guano, fumigation against xylophagous insects, placement of wood grafts, reinforcement of the panels with assemblages , elimination of modern repainting, as well as chromatic reintegration with paints in the missing parts of the pictorial layer. These achievements represented a significant progress in the recovery of the religious equipment of the Temple of the Assumption.

Mexico, 16th-century paintings resurface in a downtown church

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