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Talking Images in the Spanish Empire:Vision and ActionLuis R. Corteguera

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To cite this article: Luis R. Corteguera (2009): Talking Images in the Spanish Empire: Vision andAction, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 25:1-2, 53-68

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Talking Images in the Spanish Empire: Vision

and Action

Luis R. Corteguera

This article examines stories of religious images from different countries and time periodsthat miraculously spoke. Typically, a person in the throes of spiritual turmoil seeks succor orguidance from an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary, which replies with a brief, yetmeaningful, answer. These stories of crisis and miraculous resolution, exceptional as theywere, dramatize the common practice of late medieval and early modern Catholics of usingimages to communicate with divinity. Supplicants plead with the divine, coax gifts, andclamor for attention. During these highly charged encounters with divinity, the exchangetaking place was not entirely one-sided, as in the top-down model of communicationimplicit in a vision granted by an omnipotent God to a captive soul. Examining theinterrelation between vision and action provides important insights into an individual’srelationship with divine authority in the early modern era.

Keywords: Miracles; Religious Visions; Talking Images; Religious Images; Serra iPostius, Pere (1671–1748); Spain

A Crucifix Speaks

Sor Esperanza Gay was exhausted and in a state of spiritual turmoil when she heard

His voice. It happened in Barcelona’s Royal Monastery of Our Lady of Jerusalem of

the Daughters of Saint Clare. The nun’s demanding duties in the convent’s infirmary

left her little time to pray and eat before going to bed. She would not shorten her

rigorous penitence, which consisted of carrying a heavy cross in imitation of Christ’s

passion. One night, as she reached the last Station of the Cross, she stood before a

crucifix and exclaimed: ‘‘Lord, I’m very tired, very afflicted, and haven’t yet eaten nor

prayed the Divine Office!’’ It was then that she clearly heard ‘‘His Divine Majesty’’ tell

her: ‘‘Daughter, pray, eat, and go to rest, all of which will please me much.’’ Even

though she was tired and hungry, and nobody else heard the voice, this was not a

figment of her imagination. There was physical evidence of the miracle: the mouth of

Christ on the crucifix was now a little more open than before, as others later

testified.1

In 1710, Fray Josep Batlle (1648–1730?) recorded Sor Esperanza’s vision in the

third part of his chronicle of his Franciscan Order in Catalonia.2 He also described

the incident in another unpublished book entirely dedicated to the nun’s life. That

biography, which is apparently lost, was probably long on such pious anecdotes yet

short on hard facts. Fray Josep reported that nothing was known about Sor

Visual Resources, Volume 25, Numbers 1–2, March–June 2009

ISSN 0197–3762 # 2009 Taylor & Francis

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Esperanza’s date and place of birth, her parents, her education, and the date of her

death. Not surprisingly, he did not know when her startling experience happened—

presumably well before the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the story of her

vision had survived, along with the speaking crucifix, which her convent preserved as

a treasured relic. Other men and women staring at Christ’s open mouth must have

wondered whether they would hear the image speak to them as well.

Sometime in the 1720s, Pere Serra i Postius (1671–1748), a mercer (a shopkeeper

and trader of textiles) and amateur scholar, carefully transcribed Fray Josep Batlle’s

story of Sor Esperanza’s miraculous speaking crucifix. This was the first of nearly fifty

such miraculous incidents that had taken place in Catalonia as recorded by Serra i

Postius in his book Catalan Oracles [Oraculos catalanes]. He culled examples from

dozens of published works and manuscripts to demonstrate that Barcelona had the

largest collection in the world of holy images that had spoken. In addition to the

Catalan ‘‘oracles,’’ he included examples from other lands as far away as Mexico and

Manila. In all, he recorded nearly eighty such stories, providing an exceptional

account of these strange and powerful visions.

By underscoring the spoken word, these stories might appear at first not to

conform to what we usually think of as a vision. Sound, rather than sight, is the

protagonist in Sor Esperanza Gay’s miracle. Yet a vision need not involve sight at all.

As Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) explains in her Life, intellectual visions were

seen neither with ‘‘the eyes of the body, nor of the soul.’’3 The 1739 dictionary of the

Spanish Royal Academy gives six definitions of vision that include: the act of seeing,

the blessing of seeing God, and a prophecy or revelation.4 Divine revelation might

come in different forms, as it did to Moses, King David, or Jacob in the Old

Testament in the form of God’s voice or in the voices heard by Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–

1431). None of these involved images. All of the men and women in the oracle stories

also heard voices, but with one important difference: they all had before them a

religious image. The story does not always specify the type of image involved, but

when it does, they are mostly paintings or sculptures: twenty-three crucifixes,

nineteen paintings of the Virgin Mary or Christ, four statues of the Virgin Mary, and

one drawing of a crucifix’s painting. If the revelation in oracle stories arrives by way

of hearing, the image acts as the medium of divine revelation.

Sight is involved in a few oracle stories when crucifixes move. The slightly more

opened mouth of the crucifix provided physical proof of Esperanza Gay’s vision. In

her same convent in the 1570s, Sor Margarita Bru also noticed the mouth of a

crucifix in a drawing was open after talking to her. In another story, after speaking,

the crucified Christ took his hands off the cross to embrace a Dominican nun.

Another Dominican nun saw a crucifix ‘‘open his chest’’ to show Saint Francis of

Assisi inside as Christ said to her: ‘‘Look where I have my beloved Francis; and so, out

of my love for you I give you Francis as your companion on the path to my love.’’5

The term ‘‘oracle’’ connects sound and sight in another way. An oracle can be

both a divine response and the image (or person) conveying the response. This pagan

term seems a curious choice to describe Christian images. An early seventeenth-

century Spanish dictionary posits that ‘‘among the gentiles,’’ oracles were the

responses given by ‘‘demons and false gods, which were always wrong and

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ambiguous.’’6 By the 1720s, a ‘‘Christian oracle’’ was not an oxymoron. However, its

meaning was now confined to the object. In the Catalan Oracles, the oracle always

stands for the image or ‘‘simulacrum’’—such as Sor Esperanza’s crucifix—never for

the divine response.

At the heart of these oracle stories a conversation takes place under fairly similar

circumstances. Typically, a person in the throes of spiritual turmoil seeks succor or

guidance from a sacred image, which replies with a brief, yet meaningful, answer. The

exchange is usually quick, consisting at most of a couple of sentences, as between Sor

Esperanza Gay and the crucifix. Hearing the image talk is so startling that the

worshiper often remains speechless. Occasionally, though, the person talks back, as if

taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunity to interrogate God or the Virgin

Mary. The experience can transform a person’s life or provide a foretaste of the

afterlife. The vision is always described as a gift, a grace, or a special favor.

These stories of crisis and miraculous resolution, exceptional as they were,

dramatize the common practice among late medieval and early modern Catholics of

using images to communicate with divinity. The use of images in Catholic devotional

practices encouraged believers to think of their relationship with God as an ‘‘intimate

colloquy,’’ as art historian Jeffrey Hamburger states in his study of the visual culture

of medieval German nuns.7 Images, like letters, could bridge great distances—even

the chasm separating supplicants and God.

Listening in on these conversations with talking images allows us to examine the

relationship between an individual and divinity at a deeply intimate level. During

that highly charged moment, men and women come before God, the Virgin Mary,

and even a saint, after which their lives are never the same. One way of making sense

of what takes place at that moment is to think of the conversation the way David

Morgan approaches the act of contemplating sacred images: as an ‘‘encounter,’’

suggesting a dynamic situation even though on the surface nothing much seems to

be going on.8 Thinking of the conversations in oracle tales as encounters is helpful

in two ways. First, it requires establishing who was involved in the contact, the

context in which their exchange took place, and what each participant

communicated to the other. Second, an encounter implies that the exchange taking

place was not entirely one-sided, as in the top-down model of communication

implicit in a vision granted by an omnipotent God to a captive soul. Although often

lopsided and disconnected, the conversations in the oracle tales reveal supplicants

who pleaded with the divine, coaxed gifts, and clamored for attention. Examining

the interaction between vision and action, image and communication, can therefore

provide important insights into an individual’s relationship with divine authority in

the early modern era.

Talking Images

Most worshipers in oracle stories addressed Christ or the Virgin Mary in their various

guises. As in the case of Sor Esperanza Gay, more than one third of the talking images

were crucifixes: painted statues of Christ crucified, crucifixes carved in ivory or stone,

and paintings of the crucifixion (Figure 1). Christ also spoke in paintings depicting

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other moments of his Passion and Resurrection, including the Flagellation, Carrying

the Cross, the Descent from the Cross, and as Christ the Savior. Once or twice the

infant Jesus spoke. But after the Crucifixion, the next most frequent talking images

were statues of the Virgin Mary (seventeen), most of which represent her in her

various guises as Our Lady of Mount Carmel, of Montserrat, of Sorrows, and many

others. Overall, mother and son are not far apart in their conversations: in the

seventy-nine stories recorded, Christ spoke forty times compared to thirty-four for

the Virgin Mary. Far behind were stories of talking saints, all of whom only spoke

once: Anthony of Padua, Bruno, Francis, and Veronica. The Archangel Michael also

talked once. Not surprisingly, the ability of holy persons to speak mirrors the celestial

Figure 1 Antoine Wiericx (d. 1604), The Miracle of Segovia, 1591. In 1588, a painting of Christ crowned with

thorns and carrying the cross, placed by Saint John of the Cross above an altar in Segovia, Spain, spoke to the

saint: ‘‘Brother John, tell me what you desire that I may repay the service you did me?’’ The saint replied: ‘‘Lord,

give me your sufferings to bear that I may be diminished and count for very little.’’ Engraving.

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hierarchy, with God presiding, followed by his mother, and only then other notables

of the heavenly court.

Likewise, the worshipers who received the privilege of these heavenly

conversations follow traditional worldly hierarchies. Men outnumber women forty-

three to thirty-two (a few stories do not indicate the worshiper’s sex); religious

persons were represented three times more often than lay persons (sixty to fourteen);

and not surprisingly given the latter, there was an overwhelming preponderance of

adults over children, and young men and women (sixty-six to eight, although most

stories are vague on the person’s age). Most religious men and women belonged to

major medieval and early modern religious orders, with the Franciscans leading (in

seventeen stories), followed by the Discalced Carmelites (eleven), Dominicans tied

with the Jesuits (seven each), and then the Benedictines (six). Two popes and three

bishops also witnessed speaking images.

Chronologically, the stories span more than a millennium, from the fourth

century to the early eighteenth, with the bulk dating from the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries—the fairly recent past for Serra i Postius. For nearly a third of

the stories, it is difficult or impossible to establish a date—as we saw in the example

of Sor Esperanza Gay. Of those with a date, six are from before the thirteenth century,

the earliest of which involve the pope-saints Silvester I (r. 314–335) and Gregory the

Great (r. 590–604). With its five stories, the thirteenth century marks the first spike

before the early modern period. Then in the sixteenth century, the occasional

conversations become a chatter with more than a dozen talking images, reaching a

high point in the seventeenth with at least sixteen examples. It is impossible to predict

whether the trend would continue into the eighteenth century, but the handful of

examples known by the 1720s would suggest a good start. However, we get the

impression that Serra i Postius saw the seventeenth century as a golden age of oracles

difficult to match, let alone to surpass.

With most of the stories lacking an exact date, all conclusions about their

chronological spread remain tentative at best. Still, a few observations stand out. First,

no story dates before the fourth century, and after that only one per century until the age

of the great mendicant orders of the Dominicans and the Mercedarians in the thirteenth

and fourteenth centuries. As the frequency of these miracles picks up speed in the early

modern period, these orders, now joined by the Franciscans and the later Counter

Reformation orders, will be among the ones reporting the most talking images.

This chronology seems consistent with other developments elsewhere in

Christianity. In his vast work on icons, Hans Belting reports no miraculous

conversations involving religious images until the thirteenth-century legends of

Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180–ca. 1240). As retold a hundred years later by

Jacopo Passavanti in Lo specchio della vera penitenza, a knight asked a question to an

icon of the Virgin Mary, who spoke ‘‘through the mouth of the image.’’ Rather than

address the worshiper, the Virgin Mary relayed the question to the child Jesus, who

gave no answer and even turned his face from her. Only after further insistence, did

Jesus respond to Mary, ignoring the knight, who merely listened to their exchange.9 It

appears that, until the early modern era, Christ and the Virgin Mary preferred to keep

their conversations to themselves.

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Second, the real wave of talking images coincides with the start of the

Reformation. It would appear that the iconoclastic fury unleashed on religious

images by the various Protestant churches finally broke the ice of the divine

conversations. In this sense, oracle tales represent one variation in the torrent of

miraculous tales encouraged by the Catholic Church to corroborate God’s acceptance

of religious images. However, this explanation fails to account for the fact that none

of the oracles recorded by Serra i Postius came from regions where iconoclasts

threatened Catholic images. One might have expected that, as ‘‘evil heretics’’

attempted to behead a statue or tear a painting, God and the Virgin Mary would have

taught everyone a lesson by speaking up. The opposite is true: all of the examples

dating from the early modern period come from Catholic countries, above all, Spain,

its colonies, and Italy, all places where religious images faced little threat.

Leaving aside the possibility that Serra i Postius simply failed to find stories

beyond Catholic lands, the specific location of the oracle tales he recorded might

provide an answer. Nearly half of the stories give a specific location, and in all of

them the miraculous conversation happened in religious buildings, mostly convents

and monasteries, a few cathedrals, and parish churches. This is especially true of the

more recent oracle stories from the sixteenth century onward. Only two of the nearly

eighty conversations take place in the countryside, both in caves. One is the famous

cave in the Catalan town of Manresa, where Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556)

underwent a momentous spiritual experience. Since it had become a celebrated

shrine, Serra i Postius limited his description to the stone crucifix that spoke to the

founder of the Jesuits without relaying the conversation that took place. The other

cave appears in a tale that dates from 1591. Yet the cave was built on the grounds of

the Capuchin monastery in Sarria, close to Barcelona, to house a statue of the Virgen

de la Pobreza, which Fray Lorenzo de Huesca had brought from its original rural

shrine that had fallen into disrepair.10

In several works, William Christian, Jr., has argued that in the early sixteenth

century the Catholic Church carried out a repression of apparitions, often in the

countryside, reported by lay people. The Church promoted instead the cult of images

in urban shrines under its direct control.11 This shift in devotional practices may help

to explain the preponderance of nuns and monks over lay people in oracle stories.

Among the stories that involved lay people, only one dates from recent times, and it

fits the pattern outlined by William Christian: a statue of the Virgen de los Dolores

(also known as la Virgen Dolorosa), located in a shrine in the Barcelona convent of

the Virgen del Buen Suceso. Serra i Postius declared himself a devotee of the Virgen

Dolorosa and owned a print of the miraculous image.12 His sources for the oracle tales

associated with her cult were clergymen.13

However, the stories in Catalan Oracles tell us more about the nature of the

encounters rather than about the times in which they took place, which are often

impossible to determine with precision. Nor is it clear whether most of those oracles

led to the establishment of shrines. More than just a story of church control over

visionary experience, the preponderance of miracles in convents and monasteries also

tells us that Christ, Mary, and the saints chose to speak out only to those who came

before them, not with threats, but with deep respect for their images.

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The latter points to a third observation: these stories seem to respond to a

personal, rather than a public—the community’s—timing. Collectively, these oracle

tales do not coincide neatly with any specific political, social, or religious turmoil, as

is the case with stories of the discovery of buried images that survived the Arab

invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, or visions of bleeding statues, of the Virgin Mary,

and moving crucifixes, which have been tied to periods of turmoil.14 As someone

deeply interested in the history of Catalonia, Serra i Postius knew about portents and

miracles leading to the Catalan Revolt of 1640 from reading historical works.15 But in

Catalan Oracles he does not make any connections between oracle stories and current

events. In contrast, the moment chosen by an image to address the worshiper was

usually tied to a key moment in his or her life, such as the transition from childhood

(or young adulthood) to adult life or from this life to the next—as when an image

alerts a worshiper of an impending death. At other times, the miraculous

conversation coincides with a moment of spiritual doubt.

Nearly always, the oracle marks a turning point, marking a clear before-and-

after in a person’s life, as was the case with Saint Ramon Nonat (1200?–1240), one

of the founders of the Mercedarian Order. Born to a dead mother, young Ramon

addressed an image (not specified) of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus, located

in a shrine near his native town of Solsona (Catalonia), with the following words:

‘‘Lady, I haven’t known a mother. I chose you as such from the moment I had

reason; and now I declare again: accept me, receive me, Lady, as a son.’’ Mary

replied: ‘‘Don’t fear, Ramon, from now on I accept you as my son; therefore from

now on you may call me aloud ‘Mother’ and live with great certainty that you will

earn my patronage and continuous protection.’’16 At another time, Ramon asked

the same image whether he should continue with his studies. This time, the infant

Jesus commanded the future saint to continue his studies. Ramon said he was

ready to obey, but had no books nor did he know anyone who could teach him.

‘‘None of this should concern you,’’ responded Jesus, who added ‘‘I will send you

teachers.’’17 The subjects discussed in these conversations turn around Saint

Ramon Nonat’s fateful decision to dedicate his life to the priesthood and establish

an order in honor of the Virgin Mary.

The personal timing of these conversations is even more dramatic in two other

oracle stories. Raymond of Toulouse (d. ca. 1338), the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old

son of the count of Montfort, joined the Mercedarians after an image of the Virgin

Mary on the main altar of the order’s Barcelona monastery commanded the child to

‘‘stay here as my son in my house.’’18 Upon hearing that his relative Raymond would

not become a soldier, Jordi de Lluria, a twenty-five-year-old soldier and nephew of

the famous Catalan warrior Roger de Lluria (ca. 1245–1305), angrily declared that he

and several of his fellow soldiers would abduct Raymond from the monastery. After

Jordi and his men scaled the monastery’s walls in search of the boy, the same image of

Mary that talked to Raymond now asked Jordi: ‘‘Why do you persecute those whose

feet you will kiss tomorrow? You are mine, Brother Jordi, and I choose you as my

own.’’19 He, too, joined the Mercedarians. As a lay member of a confraternity

dedicated to la Virgen de la Merced (which he joined in 1700), Serra i Postius knew

well the painting that was the protagonist in these stories.20

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Oracle Stories

As these three stories illustrate, most of the stories in Catalan Oracles have a

connection to the Principality of Catalonia, which Serra i Postius argued was the land

God had blessed with more oracles than anywhere else in the world. Fifty of the

seventy-nine stories took place there. Within Catalonia, Serra i Postius’s hometown

of Barcelona had twenty stories, more than all other parts of Spain combined

(nineteen). Perhaps surprisingly, smaller Catalan towns like Tortosa (with eight

oracles) and Reus (with six) outnumbered the famed Benedictine monastery of

Montserrat (with four) and the city of Tarragona (only one), the seat of the primate

of Catalonia. Outside of the principality, Madrid came in a respectable second with

eleven stories (one of them involving the Catalan noble woman Marıa de Cardona in

the 1550s). Rome came a distant third among great cities (with five stories), but

behind smaller Catalan towns.

Why God had showered Catalonia with so rich a bounty of divine grace is a

question Serra i Postius considered only briefly. He simply noted the fact with pride,

as if there were nothing unusual about it. After all, he repeated Catalan claims that his

patria had always demonstrated an unusual devotion to the Catholic faith, including

the honor of having been the first in the Iberian Peninsula to convert to

Christianity.21 His interest in oracle stories from other parts of the world, which

included one story from Mexico and another from the Philippines, responded to his

wish to underscore Catalonia’s distinction among Catholic lands.

Clearly, the geographical distribution of oracles had more to do with the author

and his interests than with the talking images themselves. Born on 8 May 1671, Pere

Serra i Postius lived through a crucial moment in the history of Catalonia that

instilled him with patriotic zeal. He was in his early thirties at the start of the War of

Spanish Succession (1705–1715). He witnessed Catalonia rebel against the recently

installed Bourbon king of Spain, Philip V—Louis XIV’s grandson—in favor of the

Habsburg claimant to the Spanish throne, Charles, archduke of Austria, whose cause

Serra i Postius publicly favored.22 Despite the support of the English and the

Portuguese for Charles’s cause, Philip V defeated the Catalan rebels on 11 September

1714. Not only did Barcelona suffer a terrible siege (during which Serra i Postius’s

house was destroyed), but Philip also punished Catalonia by abolishing the ancient

liberties and institutions that had been one of the dearest sources of pride to Catalans.

To remind the Catalan capital of the new regime, the king demolished part of the city

and its walls to build a citadel that would house his troops.

In the 1720s, these wounds had barely begun to heal when Serra i Postius

embarked on his Catalan Oracles, which constitutes a tiny portion of an astonishing

scholarly output that betrayed his stubborn determination to hail his land and its

history. By the time of his death in 1748, he had published several works of varied

length, mostly in Spanish, but also in Catalan, dealing with such topics as the lives of

Catalan saints, a history of Our Lady of Montserrat, and tales of miracles that had

taken place in Catalonia. More impressive still are the unpublished manuscripts he

left behind, several in Catalan. They include inventories of past and present Catalan

authors, clergy, Barcelona city councilors, and viceroys of Catalonia. His massive, if

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incomplete, Ecclesiastical History of the Principality of Catalonia [Historia eclesiastica

del Principado de Cataluna] consists of twelve volumes.23 In addition, Serra i Postius

translated works, wrote poems, and amassed a huge library of published works and

manuscripts that he copied. During his lifetime he gained the admiration of many.

Most recognized in Serra i Postius a man of enormous erudition. An 1836 dictionary

of Catalan authors argued that, in his desire to praise friends, patria, and the

Mercedarian Order, he may have been ‘‘too long-winded and profuse’’ [demasiado

prolijo y abundante en algunas partes], and that his works suffered from the

‘‘religious credulity’’ [credulidad religiosa] typical of his time.24 More recent scholars

have been more generous, praising Serra i Postius’s remarkable productivity and

describing some of his work as ‘‘extraordinary.’’25

Catalan Oracles is typical of an important part of Serra i Postius’s oeuvre, which

consists of extended lists: of officials, clerics, saints, miracle stories, dates, relics, and

the like. In fact, he specifically compared oracles, which for him meant exclusively the

religious images, to other types of relics that abounded in Catalonia. In the

introduction to Catalan Oracles, he describes Barcelona as a ‘‘precious reliquary’’ and

a ‘‘little chest’’ holding eighteen thorns from the ‘‘Crown of Our Savior,’’ an entire

veil that had belonged to the Virgin Mary, two strands of hair from her head, and

many pieces of the Holy Cross, which the reader could learn more about in another

of his (apparently unpublished) books, Tree of Life Planted in Catalonia [Arbol de la

vida plantado en Cataluna].26 The city was also an ‘‘urn’’ holding twenty-seven bodies

of saints (three of them complete), a ‘‘medal’’ bearing eight heads of holy martyrs and

virgins, and ‘‘happy and blessed’’ for having more than thirty images that had

miraculously spoken.

If one detects a certain accounting obsession—after all, he was a tradesman—

there was a method to his madness. He meticulously notes his references to every

oracle story down to the page number or the individual who provided a certain piece

of information. (Surprisingly, Serra i Postius did not confess to witnessing an image

talk, even though he knew of men and women who did.) He scoured the libraries and

archives of Catalonia’s monasteries and convents in search of oracles and other facts

for his multiple projects. He lets his readers know the whereabouts of a particular

painting or crucifix, and whether he has seen the image himself. When he could not

consult a manuscript in person or interview someone with the information he

needed, he wrote letters, some of which are bound in his manuscript along with

tallies for expenses. But above all, the mercer was a voracious reader who managed to

keep track of the myriad facts carefully collected to prove the many points he sought

to make. Many of the published sources for Catalan Oracles consist of lives of saints,

where one is likely to find miracle tales. Other examples come from histories of

towns, of religious orders, and of specific religious houses. My preliminary efforts to

track down the references to the oracle stories have led me to appreciate Serra i

Postius’s thoroughness, which inspires trust in his scholarship, despite the odd nature

of his subject matter and his carefree acceptance of every miracle cited as true.

Yet it is precisely the uncritical transcription of oracle stories that makes Catalan

Oracles an extraordinary source for the study of talking images in the Spanish

empire—not limited to Catalonia. We might appreciate this better by noting that

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these tales differ significantly from many others in which talking images appear in

very different contexts. For example, in his attempt to demonstrate that sculpture was

more likely to inspire idolatry than painting, the early seventeenth-century painter

Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644) described how Egyptian priests pretended that

statues of gods were alive and could move.27 On the other hand, the seventeenth-

century writer Juan de Zabaleta declared that if the king of Spain could only send to

his kingdoms royal statues magically capable of speaking, they would console the

sadness of subjects unable to glimpse their ruler.28

Talking images appear as well in some of the greatest works of early modern

Spanish literature. One of the most famous plays, El burlador de Sevilla (1630),

usually attributed to the Mercedarian Tirso de Molina (ca. 1571–1648), who at one

point lived in the order’s Barcelona monastery, introduced the character of Don Juan,

whose tragic end comes at the hands of the moving and talking stone statue of the

Comendador.29 Miguel de Cervantes had Don Quixote and Sancho Panza fall for a

ruse —carried out in Barcelona!—consisting of a head that could magically answer

any questions posed to it. In the story, the talking head’s owners had to put it away

for fear that the Inquisition might want to investigate it.30 But the Inquisition in fact

looked into numerous reports in Spain and Mexico of miraculous images, some of

which allegedly talked.

The conversations with talking images related in Catalan Oracles differ from

many other such stories by providing the sense that a real encounter has taken place

with divinity. Almost always a man or a woman comes humbly before a religious

image to appeal to Christ, to the Virgin Mary, or to a saint. The miraculous answer

often follows dramatic gestures of humility and sorrow: cries, tears, kneeling, and

prostration in front of images; embracing of statues and crucifixes. The striking

difference is that the usual ‘‘intimate colloquy’’ that would follow turns into an actual

dialogue that the worshipers can hear, even if nobody else can—at least most of the

times. In two instances, a group of people hears the same words spoken by the oracle:

a painting of Christ the Savior addressing the Roman people as Pope Silvester

officiated mass; and several male novices hearing words come from an infant Jesus

(perhaps a sculpture, no specific date reported) at Barcelona’s monastery of the

Discalced Carmelites.31

Encounters

The encounters in oracle stories recall a similar type of ‘‘meeting’’ described in

petitions made to the king in early modern Spain. As in the conversations with

talking images, petitioners present themselves in their written pleas as if coming

before the Spanish monarch at a royal audience. In the 1580s, King Philip II ordered

that subjects address their petitions to the monarch with the simple Senor—which

has been described as evidence of Philip’s sobriety and modesty, although it was also

how Spaniards addressed God. In their written pleas, petitioners approach humbly,

describing themselves as poor men, desperate mothers, forlorn widows, and orphans.

More often than not, before taking leave of the monarch, supplicants kiss the royal

hands or feet, kneel before his majesty, and occasionally throw themselves at his feet.

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Coming to speak before the king was akin to coming before God, and it was

appropriate for the petitioner to approach, even if only on paper, with the kind of

humility and reverence with which one approached an image of God.

A prayer to God was also akin to a petition addressed to the king of Spain,

explained in the early seventeenth century by the Franciscan Juan de Santa Marıa. He

found support for his claim in Ecclesiastes 4:1: ‘‘So I returned, and considered all the

oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were

oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was

power; but they had no comforter.’’ The oppressed could reach God anywhere, Juan

de Santa Marıa explained, the way subjects everywhere could reach the Spanish king,

namely, by presenting him with a memorial, or a formal petition. But whereas

subjects of the Spanish monarch relied on handwritten petitions, the lonely and

desperate anywhere simply had to cry, and their petitions would reach God as if they

were petitions written with tears, which when they fell on the ground would rise

straight to Heaven, where divine councils would determine the appropriate course of

action.32 If petitions, tears, prayers, and I would add, images were means of

communicating with a higher authority, oracle stories made it explicit that, in the

case of God, this communication was two-way.

But just as petitions recreate a royal audience, which was an exceptional privilege

reserved to a favored few in the Spanish court, images in oracle stories make possible

the rare favor of an audience before ‘‘His Divine Majesty’’ and ‘‘Our Sovereign

Queen’’—as Serra i Postius repeatedly referred to Christ and to the Virgin Mary. As

David Morgan has argued, ‘‘the image creates a devotional space, a place to

encounter or interact with the sacred.’’33

To say that the religious image creates a space forces us to rethink the

relationship between individual and God as assumed by early modern Catholic beliefs

regarding religious images. As Serra i Postius repeatedly declares, God and the Virgin

Mary used the oracles to speak through them to men and women. Images in

themselves could do nothing. The church approved the use of images, ‘‘not for

themselves’’—reads a 1611 definition of imagen— ‘‘but rather because of what they

signify and represent.’’34 Divinity gives images meaning, just as it uses images as a

means to communicate to the faithful. Simply put, the power of the image lay in God.

Yet at times it seemed as though that divine power rubbed off on the image and

somehow remained there, the way a saint’s relic retained a certain sacred energy even

after the holy person was long gone. This power by association seemed present in the

oracles, which worked miracles by proxy. This was the case in Sor Margarita Bru’s

vision in the 1570s already described, during which she saw the mouth of a crucifix

open. The crucifix was a drawing of a painting of the crucifix that had spoken decades

earlier in Valencia to Saint Thomas of Villanova (San Tomas de Villanueva), who

lived between 1488 and 1555. The divine power of Saint Thomas’s painting was

strong enough that it could, in historian William Taylor’s words ‘‘broadcast sacred

energy’’ through a drawing of it.35

Oracles, like relics, could continue to speak miraculously time and again. The

Discalced Carmelite convent of Reus had a Nuestra Senora del Carmen made of

alabaster, which spoke three different times between 1687 and 1723 to three different

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nuns (in addition to saving a novice who had fallen from a ladder while cleaning it).

After the statue spoke to Sor Agustina de San Jose in 1723, the nun wrote a letter to

Serra i Postius relaying the following words that had come from the image: ‘‘Soon,

someone in the house you pray for will die.’’ He understood the message to refer to

his mother, who died soon after, as the statue had predicted.36

An object with special powers, such as a relic, might tempt some to use it for the

wrong reasons, as church authorities knew all too well. The Catholic Church’s

promotion of movable images in urban shrines sought to prevent such potential

abuses by those seeking to misuse relics and other religious images. It is difficult,

perhaps impossible, to assess the church’s effectiveness in stemming misuses of

images. One may read the Inquisition’s frequent investigations of such practices as

evidence of effective repression as well as of their stubborn persistence. Likewise, even

though the devout Serra i Postius may have copied only oracle stories that conformed

to Catholic orthodoxy, some of his examples suggest how men and women might

unintentionally manipulate, even misuse, images.

‘‘In our days,’’ Serra i Postius explains, in the Convent of the Immaculate

Conception in the city of Tortosa, there was ‘‘an image’’ (we are not told what kind)

of the Virgin Mary, which Sor Marıa de la Cruz ‘‘beseeched’’ with excessive ‘‘caresses,

flattery, and obsequiousness,’’ calling her ‘‘so beautiful and pretty, dawn of the

darkness of this life, sun that destroys the shadows of sin.’’ The Virgin became

displeased by the nun’s effusiveness and snapped at her: ‘‘If I’m the Mother of an

offended God, the Mother should be offended. So don’t call me ‘so beautiful’ but ‘so

offended.’’’ The voice came out of the image with the ‘‘vehemence of a thunder,’’

knocking down Sor Marıa. Prostrated on the floor, and more startled by the image’s

harsh admonition than by the fact that it had miraculously talked, the nun broke into

tears and declared apologetically: ‘‘But what I ask for [is in the name of] your

immaculate conception, and for the grace with which you were bestowed and made

beautiful from your first instant.’’37

What had Sor Marıa de la Cruz ‘‘beseeched’’ to warrant the Virgin Mary’s angry

response? Was the Virgin truly angry or was she just testing the nun’s avowed

devotion? This Virgin Mary seemed closer to the powerful and fearsome queen of the

early Middle Ages, rather than to the ‘‘kind and gentle’’ lady more typical of late

medieval and Renaissance apparitions.38 To snap at the nun with enough force to

throw the woman on the floor suggests Mary had been really angered by Sor Marıa’s

attempt to manipulate her with flattery. The nun’s efforts seriously backfired: Mary

was ‘‘so offended.’’ Serra i Postius, who limited his role as author to selecting and

transcribing the oracle stories, simply states (or copies from his source) that Sor

Marıa’s reply sought to ‘‘assure’’ Mary of the sincerity of the nun’s ‘‘petitions.’’

The possibility of a different kind of manipulation comes across more clearly in

another story involving Paula Ines Cabesa (1608–1661), a beata associated with the

Jesuit Order in Barcelona. Paula Ines had a special devotion to a crucifix she would

take from her private chapel to her bed, where she would embrace it. If she went to

bed without it, she would cry out: ‘‘Oh my Jesus! My Husband, where art thou?’’ The

crucifix would then come to her on its own (we are not told exactly how) and stand

on her chest, telling her: ‘‘Here you have me, my Wife, on your breast and heart.’’39 If

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she were away from the chapel and called out to him because the Devil was harassing

her, or because of ‘‘her frequent ailments,’’ He would similarly ‘‘come to [her]

hands.’’ Regarding the whereabouts of this ‘‘portentous Image’’ after Paula Ines’s

death, Serra i Postius added, ‘‘I have no news.’’40

By arguing that Paula Ines Cabesa ‘‘manipulated’’ a miraculous image, I do not

mean to suggest that she intended to misuse the crucifix for a purpose not fully

condoned by the church. Nothing suggests this much in the story as told by Serra i

Postius, who cited a life of the beata in his possession written by a Jesuit. Instead, I

simply want to call attention to the fact that Paula Ines could command this ‘‘oracle’’

to come to her whenever she needed or wanted him. Other oracle stories describe

men and women who had frequent conversations with images. Every time the

Capuchin Father Angel de Figueras (d. 1660) spoke to a carved image of the Virgin

Mary he kept by his sickbed, she always replied as a mother does to her son. At least

four different images of Christ talked to Candia Gioth, a Franciscan tertiary from

Tortosa in the same period. In these stories, it was as if the images responded to a

power the worshiper had over them.41

These oracle tales suggest that in the space created by the image for worshiper

and God to meet, perhaps the balance of power was not exclusively on God’s side.

The poor and humble men and women who came before the heavenly king and

queen might in fact force them to respond to their pleas and cries by granting them a

gift of divine grace, such as a vision. If God’s grace was free, and He was not bound by

any debts to human beings, it sometimes seemed that these powerless humans could

almost force His hand. The seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian (of

German parents) Juan Eusebio Nieremberg seemed to suggest as much when

explaining the power of contrition. In his work Del aprecio y estima de la gracia divina

[On the Value and Worth of Divine Grace], Nieremberg declares that even though

God’s grace is always free, the soul that expresses sincere contrition is capable of

moving God to pardon even the most abominable sins: ‘‘Contrition is so efficacious,

that if one had [committed] all of the sins of Arius [the ancient heretic], Mohammed,

Luther, the Anti-Christ, together with all of the sins of Lucifer and his acolytes, with

only one act of true contrition they [the sins] would all be pardoned, and one would

become as beautiful as an angel.’’42

Conclusion: Vision and Action

During a vision, the visionary appears to epitomize complete passivity before the

almighty power of God. But such passivity comes after the whirlwind of activity that

precedes a vision: sustained penitence, repeated spiritual exercises and ‘‘works’’

[trabajos], constant sacrifices, patient suffering, relentless pleading and begging. Prior

to the moment of encounter, the soul seems never to stand still before God. There is

stubborn resistance to divine will. God is constantly on the lookout, like a vigilant

hunter after its prey. In the Song of Solomon, so favored by Saint Teresa of Avila,

Saint John of the Cross (see Figure 1), and the whole host of early modern Spanish

mystics, they found a relationship between the soul and God described as the

courtship of two lovers longing for each other. Oracle tales remind us of other

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parallels: the loving husband running after his beloved wife, the angry queen or

mother chastising a phony flatterer or misbehaved daughter, parents constantly

attending to their needy children. On a spiritual plane, the relationship between

individual and divine authority seems a little more dynamic than the model of

complete passivity before absolute power would suggest.

Oracle tales suggest another way to reconsider other power relations. The

Catholic Church’s repression of late medieval apparitions did not quell the

widespread longing of men and women to seek out contact with the divine; it just

pushed it into other areas and into different forms of expression. By moving relics

and holy images away from rural shrines into towns and cities, where the clergy could

oversee religious devotion more closely, the church did not entirely succeed in

harnessing that devotion, which time and again would seem to burst into new cults

and forms of devotions. By coming before religious images charged with the power of

the divine, men and women found a place where they might themselves harness some

of that power and use it at their will.

LUIS R. CORTEGUERA is associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. He

is the author of For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640 (Cornell

University Press, 2002) and numerous articles on politics, religion, and culture in early

modern Spain. He is currently at work on three books: a study of the interactions of

ordinary people with their Spanish king; an examination of ‘‘talking’’ images of royalty

and saints in early modern Spain; and a case study of a two-faced effigy and an

inquisitional investigation in sixteenth-century Mexico.

1 ‘‘Senor, hallome muy cansada, muy afligida, y aun no e comido, ni e podido rezar el

Divino Oficio. Y su Divina Magestad, por med[i]o de aquella Imagen, le respondio:

Hija vete a rezar, come e hiraste a descancar, que todo me sera muy grato’’ [emphasis

in the original] (Pere Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 26–26v, MS A-87,

Arxiu Historic de la Ciutat de Barcelona).

2 Josep Batlle, ‘‘Chronica de la Provincia de los frayles menores de la Regular

observancia del S. P. S. Franco. de Catalunya,’’ fols. 107v–108, MS 994, Biblioteca de

la Universitat de Barcelona, Seccio de Reserva.

3 Cited in Jose de Jesus Marıa, Subida del alma a Dios que aspira a la union (n.p.,

1694), 402.

4 The third definition reads: ‘‘Vale tambien especie que Dios envıa o infunde por

modo de revelacion, ya sea en objeto real u aparente. Tomase algunas veces por

profecıa’’; Diccionario de la Real Academia (1739), online at http://www.rae.es/

rae.html (accessed 26 October 2008).

5 Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fol. 126v (Margarita Bru), fol. 128v (the

Dominican Violante Planes), fols. 129–129v (the Dominican Hipolita de Rocabertı).

6 See oraculo in Sebastian de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, ed. Felipe C.

R. Maldonado (Madrid: Castalia, 1995).

7 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval

Convent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 164–

65.

8 David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 57.

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9 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art,

trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 418.

10 Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fol. 144v (Nuestra Sra. de la Pobreza) and fol.

154v (Ignatius of Loyola).

11 William A. Christian, Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 150–51.

12 Jose Marıa Madurell Marimon, ‘‘Mas sobre Pedro Serra Postius,’’ Analecta Sacra

Tarraconensia 46 (1973): 387.

13 Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fol. 141v.

14 See William A. Christian, Jr., Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1992).

15 Specifically, Serra i Postius read the Barcelona tanner Miquel Parets’s chronicle of

the 1640 revolt and transcribed parts of it; James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus:

Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University

Press, 1998), esp. 66–67. For tales of portents leading up to the revolt, see Luis R.

Corteguera, For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640 (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), chap. 8.

16 ‘‘Senora, yo no he conosido otra Madre … que a vos, que por tal os elegı desde que

tuve razon, y aora lo retifico: admitidme, recibidme, Senor[a], por hijo. … No temas

Ramon, porque desde aora yo te recibo por mi hijo y assı podras de aquı adelante

llamarme a boca llena Madre y vivir con gran seguredad de que alcancaras mi

patrocinio, y continua proteccion’’ (Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 168v–

169).

17 ‘‘Nada de esto te de cuydado … que yo te enviare maestros’’ (Serra i Postius,

Oraculos catalanes, fols. 169v).

18 ‘‘… quedate por Hijo mıo en mi casa’’ (Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 136).

19 ‘‘Para que persigues a los que manana as de pessar [sic for bessar] los pies? Mıo eres

fray Jorge, y para mıo te escogı’’ (Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 136–37).

20 Madurell Marimon, ‘‘Mas sobre Pedro Serra Postius,’’ 417.

21 On the special relationship of Catalonia with Christ and the Virgin Mary, see Serra i

Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 2v–3. On the claims that Catalonia was the first

region in the Iberian peninsula to become Christian, see one of the crucial texts of

the Catalan revolt of 1640 against the king of Spain, Francesc Martı Viladamor,

Noticia universal de Cataluna (1640), t. 1 of Escrits politics del segle XVII, ed. Xavier

Torres i Sans (Barcelona-Vic: Eumo Editorial, 1995), 35.

22 Madurell Marimon, ‘‘Mas sobre Pedro Serra Postius,’’ 417.

23 Universitat de Barcelona, Reserva, mss. 186–97.

24 Felix Torres Amat, Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crıtico de los

escritores catalanes (Barcelona: J. Verdaguer, 1836), 599–600.

25 For Serra i Postius’s biography and oeuvre, see Jose Marıa Madurell

Marimon, ‘‘Pedro Serra Postius,’’ Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 29 (1957),

345–400, and ‘‘Mas sobre Pedro Serra Postius.’’ Amelang has described Serra i

Postius’s Lo Perque de Barcelona (ca. 1730) as ‘‘extraordinary’’ (Flight of

Icarus, 222).

26 Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fol. 25.

27 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura, ed. Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, 2nd ed.

(Madrid: Catedra, 2001), 100–1.

28 Juan de Zabaleta, Errores Celebrados (Madrid, 1653), fol. 41.

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29 El burlador de Sevilla o El convidado de piedra, third act. The earliest versions of the

play date from 1625–1630; see edition by Alfredo Rodrıguez Lopez-Vazquez

(Madrid: Catedra, 2000), 11–12.

30 Don Quixote, pt. 2, chap. 62.

31 Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 5, 134.

32 Juan de Santa Marıa, Tratado de republica y policıa cristiana para reyes y prıncipes y

para los que en el gobierno tienen sus veces (1615; Barcelona, 1617), fol. 85v.

33 Morgan, Visual Piety, 57.

34 ‘‘… No por sı absolutamente, sino por lo que significan y representan’’

(Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua, 663).

35 William B. Taylor, ‘‘Two Shrines of the Cristo Renovado: Religion and Peasant

Politics in Colonial Mexico,’’ American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005):

968.

36 ‘‘Presto una persona, de la casa por quien ruegas, morira’’ (Serra i Postius, Oraculos

catalanes, fol. 166v).

37 ‘‘… En nostros dıas … una Imagen de Marıa Santısima, … a la Madre Sor Marıa de

la Cruz hablo. Fue el caso, que estando dicha Religiosa en presensia de una Imagen

de Nuestra Senora, a quien entre carisias alagos y sumisiones le rogava, llamandola:

toda … hermosa, y linda; aurora en las tinieblas de esta vida, Sol, que destruye las

sombras del pecado: pidiole el remedio de los pecadores. Salio de la Imagen una voz,

que con vehemencia de rayo la derribo; percibiendo le dezıa: Sı soy Madre de un Dios

ofendido, ofendida a de estar la Madre, y no me llames toda hermosa, sino toda

ofendida. A esto prorrumpio en lagrimas, postrada en tierra, la sierva del Senor,

diziendo: pero os lo pido (replico) por vuestra purıssima Concepcion y por la gracia

con que fuisteis adornada y hermoseada en vuestro primer instante’’ (Serra i Postius,

Oraculos catalanes, fols. 79v–80).

38 Christian, Apparitions, 56–57, 74.

39 ‘‘Ay Jesus mıo! Esposo mıo donde estays Aquı me tienes Esposa mıa en tu pecho y

corazon’’ (Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 37–37v).

40 ‘‘Assı tambien solıa venirle a las manos otras veces que estando lexos de su capilla le

desseava, y llamava ya por hallarse acometida del demonio, o ya por verse apretada

de sus males. … Donde paro esta portentosa Imagen quando Paula Cabeca murio …

no a llegado a mi noticia’’ (Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 37–37v).

41 Serra i Postius, Oraculos catalanes, fols. 146 (Angel de Figueras), fols. 146v–150

(Candia Gioth).

42 ‘‘Es tan eficaz la contricion, que si uno tuviera todos los pecados de Arrıo, Mahoma,

Lutero, el Antecristo y juntamente todos los pecados que hicieron Lucifer con sus

secuaces, con solo un acto de contricion verdadero se le perdonara todos, y quedara

hermoso como un angel’’ (Obras escogidas del R. P. Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, ed.

Eduardo Zepeda-Henrıquez, Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles 103 [Madrid: Atlas,

1957], 384). Natalie Zemon Davis in The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), chap. 7, contrasts this notion of contrition in

Catholic theology to Calvin’s insistence on the strictly free nature of divine grace.

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