What Are You Looking at When You Look at a Mexican Cathedral?
Updated October, 2023
The power of a cathedral
Cathedrals bring out in a sense of connection with the eternal, especially on Holy Days of Obligation. These beautiful, exalting, powerful testaments beat out my cynicism and fill me with a sense of the mystery of faith. Cathedrals are our human attempt to use the power of architecture to lift us up, to “arch our hearts up to heaven.”
A Spanish friend of mine lives in León, Spain frequently visits the Catedral de León, one of the most beautiful gothic cathedrals in all of Europe. An atheist, even he admits to being unable to resist submiting to its power, with its the light filtering through the 130 enormous stained glass windows of ruby reds and sapphire blues.
“Most people who go into a cathedral don’t realize what they are looking at.” he remarked, which led me to wonder “What am I looking at when I look at a Mexican cathedral?
You can’t separate Mexican cathedrals from their European roots. That special light my friend spoke of is the manifesto of gothic cathedral architecture as envisioned by Abbot Denis Suger, a french abbot credited with popularizing the Gothic style in Europe.
Suger saw the light as a way to emulate being in heaven. His “light of Divine essence” filters through the many-colored windows and creates a glow not quite of this world. The light he likened to the Word of God. The power of gems adorning altars also have to do with their ability to give off light and glow from within.
The only cathedral in Mexico that can be classified as gothic is Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City, the first cathedral built in Mexico. The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven took three centuries to build. It was designed by Spaniard Claudio de Arciniega. In the rest of Mexico cathedrals, gothic style is mixed with other styles, such as neoclassic and baroque.
A little medieval sex play, as seen in a Gothic cathedral. Various explanations exist as to how the sex scenes came to be in the stonework of great European cathedrals.
Not all you see in a European gothic cathedral is pure and holy, by the way. In fact, a fair amount of medieval porn made its way in to the stonework under the very noses of the the provosts.
Various theories exist on how it got there. Some say that the racy stonework is meant to illustrate the daily lives of the common folk (although priests and nuns are depicted too), including sex. More likely the artists, not all holy men, were just having a little passive-aggressive fun at the expense of their overseers.
Mexico’s cathedrals
Almost every city popular with foreigners in Mexico; Guanajuato, Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende, Querétaro, Pátzcuaro, Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Morelia, Puebla and Oaxaca as well as other cities have cathedrals.
The building of the major cathedrals in Mexico were all nearing completion by 1680. Their construction wasn’t possible until architects had mastered the principles of constructing the complex systems of massive isolated supports and vaulted roofs that seem to defy the laws of gravity which define the cathedral. The cathedral-building period was preceded by what’s referred to the “monastic period,” of chuches built by abbeys of monastic orders, such as the Jesuits.
Most Mexican cathedrals built later than 1700 were parish churches converted to cathedrals as populations grew. Mazatlán, where I live, has a cathedral too, but is one of those completed much later.
Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral took three centuries to build.
Like all cathedrals, a Mexican cathedral’s high vaulted ceiling is meant to create a microcosm of the heavens and strike the worshipers with awe at the power of God and creation.
Again light, both natural and an extensive repertoire of lanterns, torches and candelabras are designed to lend even more drama to church interiors and exteriors by day and by night. Facades and retables* in cathedrals are planned to lead the eye to distinct points of emphasis.
You can’t separate Mexican cathedrals from their Spanish roots, and many of the workers on the Mexican cathedrals actually did come from Spain, which sought artistic conquest of Mexico as well as religious and economic. A Spaniard, Lorenzo Rodriguez played a dominant role in vice regal architecture in Mexico, which is sometimes dubbed “Ultra Baroque," or Mexican Churrigueresque.
What the Spaniards did not take in to account was that building materials in the New World would be so different. Reddish pumice, grey white limestone of Mexico City, the green brown stone of Oaxaca, washes of green and pink in San Miguel, pink trachyte of Morelia and the man-made tile for which Puebla is known make Mexican cathedrals distinct from European counterparts.
Like a child’s relation to a parent, sometimes Mexican architects and craftsmen responded to a different set of values. Local artisans had to adapt their style to their native skill, leading the very word “colonial” at one time to be considered a pejorative rather than the positive connotation it's given today in travel brochures.
Mexicans were more into surface design than sculpture. Paintings of idealized religious figures are featured rather than carry over the realistic (and sometimes scandalously graphic) representations of medieval life you’ll find in European Gothic cathedrals.
Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption of Mary in Guadalajara
Major Mexican church architectural periods go from 1530 to 1810. They include the Plateresque period, named for work of Spanish silversmiths in that era, going from 1530 until 1580, the Baroque period going from 1580 to 1630, the Ultra Baroque from 1630 to 1790 and finally the Neo-Classical period from 1790 to 1810 and later.
Mexico had a surprising preoccupation with the concept of grandeur, La grandeza mexicana, which accounts for Baroque’s long predominance in Mexico. Baroque style is characterized by towering silhouettes and dazzling facades and retables. The style has always been defined as ornate, wild, eccentric and inharmonious (exactly as you might define Mexico itself).
The term “Ultra Baroque,” a somewhat contested term for the later period of Baroque in Mexico. It is a style specific to Latin America. The phrase Ultra Baroque is a metaphor for the region’s complex ethnic and artistic racial composition rather than meaning "more of," or “beyond Baroque” as many assume.
There were two basic compositional arrangements in vice regal Mexico when the major cathedrals were built. On the more ambitious facades you see various motifs associated with the estípite, a type of column with turned down spirals and elaborate carvings which are essentially Renaissance Italian, with a splash of Rococo added to later ones.
On less ambitious facades, you’ll see a narrow stepped composition with the higher levels progressively narrower than the lowest level. These are more Islamic, influenced by designs in Seville and Granada in southern Spain.
The interior ornamentation with depictions of heads of angelic children, plates of fruit, garlands along with the design of columns is essentially Renaissance. Sometimes styles clash jarringly in Mexican cathedrals, with sculptures and paintings emphasizing a terrifying realism, such as the use of actual teeth and hair and glass eyes. Gilded wood is another interior fashion specific to Mexico.
Puebla Cathedral, Mexico
The word “mestizo,' which has also been used to describe Mexican cathedrals, is a term traditionally used in Spain and Latin America to mean a person of combined European and American Indian descent, or someone who would have been deemed a mestizo (one European parent and one Mestizo parent) regardless of where the person was born. Over time, the brilliance of Mexican architecture became its gift for mixing fashions and ornamental sources in a single building, giving the word mestizo an esthetic quality in a wider sense.
* A retable is a structure or element placed either on or immediately behind and above the altar or communion table of a church.
Sources:
"The Churches of Mexico 1530-1810" by Joseph Armstrong Baird, Jr. and "The Gothic Cathedral" by William Swan.
Related link:
A video of the Puebla Cathedral - YouTube
Next up:
Big, expensive cities in the U.S. are exciting. So are less expensive Mexican big cities
About the author:
Hola, I'm Kerry Baker and author of "If Only I Had a Place," a guide to renting for the aspiring expat. Renting in Mexico is different. Rent like an insider. Live well in Mexico by learning the pitfalls and promise of renting the right place at the right price.
“The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico.” This how-to book will inform and entertain (unheard of in most books on Mexico).
My most recent book is a cookbook, The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico. You can’t maintain a healthy diet in Mexico without cooking. This book shows you how: 150 recipes and all you need to know about shopping in Mexico.