The Permeable Cenacle: Picturing the Virgin Mary and the Last Supper in Colonial Mexico

In 1720, Antonio de Torres painted an unusual rendition of the Last Supper for the Colegio Apostólico de Propaganda Fide in Zacatecas. Torres broke with convention by not only representing Christ and the apostles witnessing the institution of the Eucharist, but by amplifying the cenacle to include Mary. While scripture omits the Virgin during this biblical episode, the painting’s cartouche clarifies this unorthodox illustration: it describes an altered sequence of events in which Gabriel delivers Mary the eucharist before the apostles. The inscription also cites the textual source for the pictorial change: “according to the Venerable Mother María de Jesús de Ágreda, Part 2, Book 6, Chapter 2.” Thus, the cartouche corroborates Torres’s modified Last Supper by referencing the publication Mystical City of God written by the Spanish mystic Sor María de Ágreda.

The paper will study three paintings and consider how they incorporate the female author’s theology as a means of innovating canonical representations of the Last Supper. Like the aforementioned work by Torres, an earlier work by Juan Correa also depicts the Virgin receiving the eucharist but relegates the apostles to the background and foregrounds Mary. The third painting by Manuel Pérez de la Serna located in Querétaro also gathers saints Lucy, Clare of Assisi, and Rose of Lima in the cenacle as witnesses. As such, this paper will consider how Mexican painters transformed the Last Supper’s cenacle into a permeable space that drew attention to women’s central roles in the sacraments.