Artifacts Of An Imperishable Faith

By JAMES MONTI

Part 2

In our previous essay, we began our exploration of a room filled with stunningly beautiful artifacts of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Catholicism in Latin America, Gallery 757 in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Turning now to the painting of Our Lady with the Christ Child that first meets the eye upon entering this gallery, we need to journey in time back to early medieval Spain to discover the story behind it.
In or about the tenth century, there lived in the forested mountains of northeastern Spain a notorious bandit named Munio Honne (Nuno Onez). Travelers had reason to fear the criminal, who stalked his victims through the woods and even resorted to murder to seize their possessions.
Munio was trailing just such a victim one day, a farmer with two oxen who was on his way to his wheat field. As Munio watched from within the thick underbrush, the farmer upon reaching his field dropped to his knees, made the Sign of the Cross, and gazing toward Heaven offered a spontaneous prayer of thanksgiving to God for his wheat harvest:
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and earth, who produce all things from nothing, yet have provided that the grains of wheat, which have been scattered on this estate grow, fructify, and are increased in such a manner, that with its crop I have been enabled to succeed in sustaining my family, the ministers of the Church, and the people, so that with the blessing of your mercy sustenance may be lacking to no one: by this good fortune may your Name be praised and blessed by all now and always, Amen, O Jesus.”
At the sight of this simple act of piety, Munio was profoundly moved. Immediately repenting of his evil plot against the farmer, and of the entire life of violent crime he had led, the bandit emerged from the bushes and threw himself at the farmer’s feet, confessing what he had been intending to do and begging the farmer’s forgiveness. The farmer forgave Munio and exhorted him to do penance and amend his life. Renouncing forever his evil past, Munio took up the life of a hermit, inhabiting a cave in the woods, and devoting himself to prayer and penance.
In his eremitical life Munio was subsequently joined by a priest named Domingo. It was at this time that Munio experienced a private revelation from an angel, telling him of a beautiful image of our Lady hidden within the hollow of a broad oak tree, guarded by a swarm of bees and distinguished by a fountain of clear water flowing from beneath. He was told to go and find the tree, for he was being entrusted with the mission of revealing this hidden sacred image to the world. With the help of Domingo, Munio found the tree and discovered the wooden sculpture of Mary holding the Christ Child that was concealed within it.
Munio enshrined the statue, around which grew the Monastery of Santa Maria de Valvanera, the home of the image to the present day, at a site almost as remote as when the statue was first discovered over a thousand years ago.
The eighteenth-century Peruvian canvas in the Met Museum’s Gallery 757 that depicts Our Lady of Valvanera (ca. 1770-1780) not only testifies to the spread of this devotion to the New World, but also to details of the story surrounding its discovery. Our Lady is portrayed as seated before a giant oak tree, holding the Christ Child, both of them crowned and arrayed in gold, with bees encircling the hollow of the tree, and with Munio Honne devoutly kneeling to the right, clothed in a penitent’s robe.
A small red chest on the ground depicts the urn of relics that was also found within the hollow of the oak tree — relics that included a lock of our Lady’s hair and a piece of the table of the Last Supper.
Munio’s conversion is likewise presented symbolically. On the right, behind the kneeling figure of Munio, is a miniaturized scene depicting Munio stalking the farmer. The face of the kneeling figure of Munio in the foreground is resolutely turned away from this scene, representing his renunciation of his former life of crime, and turned instead toward our Lady and toward the scene to the left of her, a depiction of the monastery of Valvanera.
Another of the Marian paintings in Gallery 757 depicts what is traditionally the single most widely venerated image of the Blessed Virgin in Peru, Our Lady of Cocharcas, a statue made as a replica of the Bolivian image of the “Virgin of Copacabana” and brought to Cocharcas in 1598 by a Peruvian layman.
In this canvas we see Our Lady of Cocharcas being carried on a canopied float (a “paso”). Along the perimeter of the canvas can be seen pilgrims and clergy in their travels to and from the image’s shrine church, depicted in the upper right corner of the picture. The story behind this statue of our Lady begins with the statue it was meant to replicate, that of Our Lady of Copacabana.
About the year 1580, a Bolivian Catholic layman named Francisco Tito Yupanqui (+1608) decided to sculpt a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an act of personal devotion for his parish church in Copacabana. The statue was subsequently erected upon an altar, but about a year and a half later the statue was removed following the arrival of a new pastor who considered the sculpture to be very poorly executed. Tito thereupon resolved to make a second attempt to produce a fitting image of the Mother of God by journeying to Potosi in 1582 to study sculpture under the Spanish master Diego Ortiz. He completed a new statue of Mary which he then took to La Paz in order to gild the statue with the help of a gilding artisan there.
On the way to La Paz, Tito and those accompanying him paused for the night in the town of Hayohayo, resting on the front steps of Hayohayo’s town hall. The wrapped object that Tito and his companions had set down on the steps drew the attention of a magistrate, who, thinking that it was a corpse, ordered them to take it away. But when he learned that it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin, he was so moved with devotion that he asked for a light to be brought to the spot and then spent the rest of the night on his knees in prayer before Tito’s image of Mary.
There was little enthusiasm for the new statue when Tito returned to Copacabana with it, yet he succeeded in getting it accepted for veneration in the parish church. Tito had executed the statue to represent the Christ Child’s Presentation in the Temple, with Mary holding the Divine Infant in her left arm, so it was solemnly enshrined on the Feast of Candlemas, February 2, in 1583. It was on this occasion that a heavy candelabra toppled and came crashing down upon Copacabana’s magistrate, yet left him totally uninjured. This incident was seen as miraculous and proved to be a sign of things to come, with many miracles wrought through Mary’s intercession for those who venerated her image.

Numerous Miracles

At the age of twenty-three, a young man of Cocharcas, Peru named Sebastian Martin suffered a severe injury to his wrist and hand while celebrating a feast day with his friends. No longer able to assist his family in their farming, Sebastian set out on a quest for a remedy to his desperate situation. Arriving in Cuzco, he sought assistance from the Jesuits, who in turn not only fed him but taught him the Catholic faith.
While there, he met a devout Spanish noblewoman who told him about her own cure through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary following a pilgrimage to the image of Our Lady of Copacabana. With the approval of his confessor, Sebastian embarked upon his own pilgrimage to Copacabana. The answer to his prayers came much sooner than he expected, for it was during a stop in the village of Pucara that his hand was miraculously healed.
Convinced that he had received this cure from Our Lady of Copacabana, he continued his journey to her shrine, which for him had been transformed from a pilgrimage of supplication to a pilgrimage of thanksgiving. Upon arriving in Copacabana, he threw himself down on his knees before the image of our Lady and wept.
Sebastian’s gratitude inspired him with the idea of procuring a replica of the statue of Our Lady of Copacabana to bring home to Cocharcas, one that in its design would meet the ecclesiastical requirements for an image to be venerated in public worship. After obtaining a suitable statue that loosely resembled that of Copacabana, he arranged for it to be touched to the original image of Copacabana and to be placed in a room behind the original statue’s altar for an overnight stay, hoping that by doing so the replica might be blessed by Heaven with at least some of the sanctity of the original.
Heaven seems to have provided Sebastian with a visible manifestation that this favor had been granted, for his statue is said to have undergone a miraculous transformation that turned it into a true likeness of Our Lady of Copacabana.
As Sebastian journeyed back to Cocharcas, he and his beautiful image were welcomed in villages along the way, with people offering flowers to the statue of our Lady. Before reaching Copacabana, Sebastian arranged with the Jesuits for the erection of a new church to enshrine the holy image. On the day that Our Lady of Cocharcas was finally brought into the city by Sebastian, thunderstorms erupted and continued until the statue was enshrined on the finest altar in the new church built for it.
As Sebastian had hoped, this image of Mary became the instrument of numerous miracles, so much so that pilgrims from across Peru began to descend upon Cocharcas, making the difficult and dangerous journey across the mountains to reach the shrine. This in turn inspired paintings depicting the sculpture of Our Lady of Cocharcas in its mountainous setting, including the painting in the Met Museum.
A small painting in Gallery 757 (ca. 1670-1690) imaginatively depicts the great Franciscan saints Bonaventure and Anthony of Padua playing stringed instruments to celebrate our Lady’s victory over all heresies. In our own warfare against the heresies of the present age, may beautiful Catholic art inspire us with hope in the ultimate triumph of Christ and His Immaculate Mother!