The painting is revolves around a concept of great importance for the Catholic Church and one of its main tenets: the triumph of the concept of Mary's virginity over its detractors. It is represented here with a triumphal carriage that transports the Marian invocation of the Madonna del Carmen enthroned, on a landscape that could allude to Mount Carmel. In the distance an incipient mountain range that gives depth to the composition is observed, contrasting with the massiveness of the foot of a prostrate mountain on the right from where the exit of the procession is sensed. The lines corresponding to the ground describe a descending diagonal, which matches the direction in which the movement of the vehicle and its entourage is directed, to the left of the work.
The notion of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin is ed here with four banners that show the legends "Mother Virgin, Virgin Mother, Mother of Christ God"; carried like a badge by four angels on horseback, who along with four other barefoot Carmelite friars, drive the carriage over the flowery ground. In addition, a cupid holds up a parchment with texts taken from the Laurentian Litany, and we can see a couple of phylacteries with words that make reference to her virginity. [1]
As part of the entourage of the carriage a large retinue of martyred Carmelite friars is incorporated without any other attribute that distinguishes them from each other, except the brown and white habit of the Order of the Barefoot Carmelites and the palm of martyrdom. At the front of the carriage are three other cupids victoriously playing their horns in the air, and in the back an angel is seen crowning the shield of the Order, which is located on the top of the wagon.
There is a figure that calls attention in particular; it is an old man dressed in a scarlet tunic under which the brown habit of the Barefoot Carmel can be seen. He is a bishop of the east, identified as such by the traditional pallium that hangs from his neck. He is iconographically recognized as St. Peter Thomas, a Carmelite bishop born in around 1305, where he entered Carmel at twenty years of age.[2]
He was archbishop of Crete in 1363 and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople the following year. A ionate devotee of the Virgin Mary, he is credited with the authorship of the treaty De Immaculata Conceptionis, where he precisely defends the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which is why it is still ed to date by the of the Order. His cult was authorized by the Holy See in 1609, the year in which he was canonized by Pope Paul V, being ratified almost twenty years later by Urbano VIII in 1628. [3]
With this work, the author adapted the defense of the Virgin to the Order of the Barefoot Carmen, including one of its and defender of the Immaculate Conception, so that a primitive function is intuited within a private context of the order, given that the critical fortune of this saint outside of it is not so recognized,[4] as does happen with the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure.
The work shows several previous interventions as part of an amateur restoration work. It has a relining that uses a textile with the appearance of cotton adhered by means of a synthetic product that together give the painting certain rigidity. On the other hand, the pictorial layer shows a series of pictorial aggregates distributed in a dispersed manner over different elements of the composition. They do not seem to correspond with missing strata because the surrounding areas are observed in a very good state of conservation; they could belong to repairs aimed at solving some staining problem or color tacking in the materials of the work, which could not be resolved by cleaning, as was achieved in the rest of the image.
What can be rescued from the intervention is that it evidences a search to keep the intrinsic values of the work in force, perhaps as an allusion to its iconographic importance or to the recognition of its historical category, which in any case has contributed to its permanence.
1. Cfr. Francisco Xavier, Dornnm, Letanía Lauretana de la Virgen Santísima, Vda. de José de Orga, Valencia, 1768.
2. P. Rafael María López Melús, Los Santos Carmelitas, España, AMACAR, 1989, pp. 64-72.
3. Idem.
4. Comunicación personal con el P. Carlos Martínez (OCD), provincia de Toluca.
