A Copperplate Vade Mecum by Mexican Nuns, 18th Century
The survival of engraved copperplates that were clearly used in ongoing print publications like this one rarely survive. Most often they were either refurbished or simply melted down to produce fresh engraving surfaces. This plate probably survived because it was not used to illustrate a book with a time-limited print run but was kept on hand to print limited pulls off the plate to be sold over time to pilgrims who had come to the church of the Capuchin convent where they were made, or for a more general distribution within the parish.
Though no printed examples from the plate have as yet been identified, the image itself is quite complex and, at the risk of invoking an anachronistic concept, metatextual. The visual scene depicts a moment in the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, founder in 1209 of the mendicant Franciscan order, whose inspiration led Clare of Assisi to found a female order on Francis’s model, the so-called Poor Clares, or Clarissans. The Mexican nuns responsible for producing this copperplate were members of a subsequent branch of Capuchin Poor Clares founded in 1538 in strict observance of the Franciscan mendicant commitment to absolute poverty.
Brother Leo, also a native of Assisi, joined Saint Francis and became a favorite disciple as well as his personal secretary and confessor. Affectionately called by Francis his “Frate Pecorello de Dio” (Brother Lamb of God) because of his gentleness and simplicity, Brother Leo also accompanied Francis during a forty-day sojourn and fast on Mount La Verna. It was there that Francis meditated deeply on the suffering of Christ and, as he witnessed a miraculous vision of a seraphic angel, received the famed stigmata. While on the mountain, to allay Brother Leo’s fear of losing the spiritual protection of his master, Saint Francis penned a benediction for his companion, which Leo was said to have carried with him until his death more than forty years after Francis’s. A shrine in the basilica in Assisi possesses what is purported to be Saint Francis’s original autograph benediction.
In Western art, the more conventional iconography surrounding these events focused on Francis’s stigmatic vision of the angel and Brother Leo’s quiet companionship—as, for example, in Jan van Eyck’s oil painting Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata (ca. 1430). That angelic presence carries over into the visual scene in the copperplate, where Brother Leo is shown holding up a great sheaf of parchment while gazing upwards at the seraphic presence while Francis kneels on the ground, completing his writing of the benedictory text. This scene, too, has biblical roots, for it emulates the famous command from God to Moses that his brother, the priest Aaron, bless the children of Israel: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee. The Lord shew his face to thee, and have mercy on thee” (Numbers 6:22–25). The Capuchinas’ copperplate supplies its own rendition of the same, granting the benediction more pointed and plenary apotropaic powers than Saint Francis’s original:
“Fray Leon companero del S[anto]. P[adre]. S[anto]. Francisco atemnentado de impuras tentaciones y como religioso honesto no tenia valor de [?] arselo a su virtuoso Maestro pero este Santo Patriarca penetro su desconsuelo y hasiendola traer tinta y papel puso la misteriosa T. y bajo de ella escribio la BENDICION para que continuamente la llevase consigo y luego sintio Fray Leon que desaparecieron las oscuridades malignas que mucho tiempo turbaban su Corazon. Con sus copias y estampas, se han esperimentido maravillosas virtudes contra los demonios, tentaciones, rayos, centellas, terromotos, pestes calenturas, naufragios, ladrones, mal de corazon, dolores de parto, y conserva en gracia de Dios a la persona que arregla da su consiencia la lleve consigo. El original de esta Bendicion escrita en latin de mano propia del Santo se halla archivada En la Basilica de Assisi como lo le si[gni?]fica el Illmo. Cornejo en la Cronica Serafica [1682] parte 1 lib 4 cap. 25. Propiedad de la Muy RR. MM. [i.e., Reverendas Madres] Capuchinas de Puebla.”
“[Brother Leo, companion of our Holy Father St. Francis, afraid of impure temptations and as an honest religious, held no value of [?] give it to his virtuous Master, but this Holy Patriarch penetrated his grief and, making him bring ink and paper, he put the mysterious T [i.e., the cross], and under it he wrote a BLESSING so that he would continually carry it with him. And then Brother Leo felt that the evil darkness that had long troubled his heart disappeared. With its copies and prints, wonderful remedies have been experienced against demons, temptations, lightning, flashes, earthquakes, plagues, fever, shipwrecks, thieves, heart disease, labor pains, and it preserves in the grace of God the person who fixes his conscience to take it with him. The original of this blessing, written in Latin by the Saint’s own hand, is held in the archive of the Basilica of Assisi as the most illustrious [Fray Damián] Cornejo [states] in the Seraphic Chronicle [1682], part 1, bk. 4, chap. 25. Property of the Very RR. MM. [i.e., Reverend Mothers] Capuchinas of Puebla.”
Digitally Enhanced Reflection of Original Copper Plate
The Convent of the Capuchinas in Puebla began in 1655, when six nuns left the Spanish city of Toledo for the Mexican town of Veracruz, traveling at the behest of the noblewoman Doña Ana Francisca de Zuñiga. After her husband’s death, in 1703 Doña Zuñiga used her inheritance to fund the construction of a convent for this small Clarissan community, one of eleven that emerged in Puebla during the colonial period between 1568 and 1748. The specific bibliographical reference in the plate toward the end of the benediction refers to the important composite biography of Saint Francis compiled by Fray Damián Cornejo, Crónica seráfica y vida del glorioso patriarca San Francisco y de sus primeros discípulos (4 vols.; Madrid: Juan García Infanzón, 1682, 1684, 1686, 1698). The passage recording Francis’s benediction to Leo appears in part 1, book 1, chapter 25, pp. 450–52, http://www.bilbao.eus/bld/handle/123456789/50.
The production of pocket-sized, talismanic engravings such as this, also presumably to be carried around by the faithful for their personal protection, was not uncommon; the several “book amulets,” or breverl, were also often created by nuns for sale to pilgrims visiting the southern provinces of the Holy Roman Empire during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What is more, this copperplate Brother Leo benediction tradition was not unique to Mexico. Also present in JHU’s Women of the Book Collection is a later, and also apparently unrecorded, small printed ephemeron on the same theme, printed in the Italian town of Forlì in the Emilia-Romagna circa 1834–40. In this case, it is clear that it was published, not by nuns but by the artistic nobleman Conte Antonio Herculano. The image and text are much simpler than those in the Puebla plate, particularly as Brother Leo’s body obscures all but the first few words of the benedictory text. This compositional choice may have helped save the engraver from trying to squeeze a larger amount of text into a relatively small pictorial field but also seems to negate much of the apotropaic value of the benediction for those who might carry the print on their person. In this way, the Franciscan benediction seems rather to cleave more to the concise language and spirit of the Aaronic original in the book of Numbers. The engraved text reads:
“Il signore ti guardi benedica e volti la sua Benedizione di S. Francesco. Questa santa benedizione e provata da chi la porta indosso con retta divizione e piena fede molto virtuosa a conseguire da dio spirituali grazie, ed ogni espediente bene temporale. L’originale (scritto di propria dal serafico padre s. francesco) si osserva nella Basilica di Assisi. In Forlì presso A. Hercolani.”
“[May the Lord bless you and bring you the Benediction of St. Francis. This sacred blessing is proven, by whoever wears it with straight thought and complete and very virtuous faith, to attain spiritual graces from God, and every expedient temporal good. The original (written on his own by the seraphic father St. Francis) is kept in the Basilica of Assisi. (Printed) in Forlì by A. Hercolani.]”
While there the later Italian printed exemplar obviously lacks any association with a female religious house, the Mexican copperplate of the Capuchinas of Puebla raises many intriguing questions. Did these cloistered nuns keep a small print shop on their premises? A full printing press would not have been necessary to print small copperplates such as this. Certainly some sisters, such as the talented Venetian Franciscan nun Isabella Piccini (whose work is also represented in the Women of the Book Collection), were known to have mastered the physically rigorous skills of engraving and etching. Did these poblano Capuchinas personally design and fabricate this plate, or might it have been a commission executed in a secular workshop? And, last, how might these cloistered nuns have sold copies of the print to pilgrims and other visitors to their convent church?
Though the first printing press in the New World was established in Mexico City around 1539, the print trade did not make its way into Puebla in any appreciable way for another century, when in 1642 Francisco Robledo established a provincial press there. His operation was quickly followed by other pioneering printers in Mexico, such as Diego Fernández de León. Long before either of those men had arrived in Puebla, however, the first imprint produced outside of Mexico City was in fact printed on a press set up in the Franciscan convent of Santiago Tlatilulco. The relationship between female monastic houses and colonial printing was already well established when, sometime in the eighteenth century, the present Puebla copperplate was produced and—as seems clear from the residue of ink in the engraved surface—actively used on a press.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Full Citation
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Bibliography
Margaret Chowning, “Convents and Nuns: New Approaches to the Study of Female Religious Institutions in Colonial Mexico,” History Compass 6 (September 2008): 1279–1303; Silvia Evangelisti, “Expansion: Nuns Across the Globe,” in Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford University Press, 2008), esp.192–99; Asunción Lavrin, “Female Religious,” in Louisa Schell Hoberman and Susa Migden Socolow (eds.), Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 165–96; Asunción Lavrin, “Writing in the Cloisters,” in her Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008), 310–50: Wieslaw Block, “Brother Leo of Assisi, Companion of Saint Francis,” Spirit + Life: Journal of Franciscan Culture 97 (July–September 2011): 3–9; José Toribio Medina, La Imprenta en la Puebla de los Angeles [i.e., 1640–1821] (N. Israel, 1964).
