Figure, Sign and Contrivance: The "Eight" of the Virgin of Guadalupe

Abstract

Reviewing studies of the anachronism and the re-signification of images proposed by Georges Didi-Huberman, this article explores the emergence of a “spontaneous image”: the number eight painter Miguel Cabrera and historian Mariano Fernández de Echeverría y Veytia detected on the Virgin of Guadalupe ankle. An enigmatic figure which became, first, an exegetical sign, and finally—as an effect of rhetorical exercises—a device conveying a deep prophetic, even libertarian, message, the number eight also established itself as a pictorial practice inherent in the concept of vera effigie or as means of certifying copies of Juan Diego’s cloak (known as tilma or ayate), which remained current until the early twentieth century. This sign was not immune to the enlightment and rationalist critique of the eighteenth century, despite the prestige of the painter who reported it in his book Maravilla americana of 1756.