Hidden for 80 years, the images of saints and martyrs that, from above, guard the presbytery of the Temple of Our Lady of the Assumption, in the Michoacan town of Santa María Huiramangaro, have seen the light again thanks to a team of professionals in restoration and conservation of cultural heritage, who revealed an ornamentation with four centuries of history.
The culmination of the pictorial rescue of the roof of the parish derives from the collaboration between the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, through the Fund for Support to Communities for the Restoration of Monuments and Artistic Assets and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), through the INAH Michoacán Center, with the City Council of Pátzcuaro, the Committee Adopt a Work of Art AC, in said entity, and the community.
The expert-restorer of the INAH Michoacán Center and supervisor of the works, Laura Elena Lelo de Larrea López, explained that “this project allowed us to recover an extraordinary work on the horizontal cover of the main altar, and to discover the rich artistic, technical and iconographic evolution that has marked this religious site.”
The intervention revealed a rich and colorful iconography with three superimposed pictorial layers. The oldest, from the 16th century, corresponds to the creation of the set of images that, among others, represent 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, that is, it gives as an example the life of those first men and women who converted to Christianity and who, at the time of their death, achieved divine salvation.
The specialist adds that these characters, which crown the presbytery of the Temple of Our Lady of the Assumption, make up a hagiography (history of the lives of saints) rarely seen in Michoacán, as it fell into disuse in the 17th century, when themes related to the Virgin Mary, Christ or a particular saint were privileged.
Its restoration, she says, is part of a larger initiative to protect and rehabilitate the heritage assets kept in this church, such as a pair of plateresque style altarpieces, intervened in 2022 and 2023.
Lelo de Larrea comments that similar to what happened in these altarpieces, during the intervention of the horizontal cover, it was observed that it was subject to a remodeling during the 1940s, when a general repaint of white paint was applied, with blue designs, “a redecoration that caused the alteration of the physiognomy of the place.”
As the work progressed, supervised by the INAH Michoacán Center, the restorers in charge of the intervention, Joselia Cedeño Paredes and Gabriela Fernanda Contreras González, confirmed the existence of three different layers of paint on the presbytery’s planking.
The aforementioned 16th century layer is a tempera paint used to trace the characters, who were painted with thin glazes, visible in the halos and background landscapes. In the following century, oil paints in vibrant tones, such as green and orange, were placed on the characters’ clothing to highlight the volumes.
In the 20th century, acrylic paints were used to touch up the incarnations and faces of the figures, which had been partially erased in previous years. By largely respecting the initial 16th century sketch, these repaints had as their primary intention to embellish the ornamentation of the presbytery.
Joselia Cedeño and Gabriela Contreras report that the care of the planks and moldings of the roof involved various actions: cleaning of dust and bird droppings, fumigation against wood-eating insects, consolidation of galleries with rabbit glue, placement of wood grafts, reinforcement of the planks with joints, elimination of modern repainting, as well as chromatic reintegration with varnish paints in missing areas of the pictorial layer.
With the technical processes described above, corbels, partitions and Franciscan cords were also restored, elements that make up the base of the exterior roof of the temple.
These results represent a significant advance in the recovery of the religious trousseau of the Temple of Our Lady of the Assumption; however, the next challenge will be the intervention of the missing collateral altarpiece, located in the presbytery, which would be followed by the one corresponding to the horizontal cover of the nave of the temple, where the viceregal polychromy remains hidden.
Source: eluniversal
