09/02/2026
In December 1531, according to the account preserved in Mexico, the Virgin appeared on the hill of Tepeyac to an indigenous convert named Juan Diego and told him to bring roses to the bishop in his cloak. When he opened the cloak, the image was there.
The cloak is still there, in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. It is an ayate, a coarse cloth woven from maguey cactus fiber. Cloth of that kind normally decays within a few decades. For its first hundred and fifteen years it hung without any protective glass, exposed to candle smoke, incense, humidity, dust, and the hands of pilgrims.
It is nearly five hundred years old.
In May 1979 the image was examined under infrared photography by Philip Serna Callahan, a biophysicist at the University of Florida, working with Jody Brant Smith. They found that parts of the image had indeed been added later by human hands, the gold rays, the stars, the moon beneath the feet, the angel. But the original figure was different. Beneath it there was no sketch, no underdrawing, no sizing, no varnish, and no correction. Nothing that a painter leaves behind.
