Past exhibition
17 December 2025 - 19 February 2026
Location
Gonzalo Eguiguren Gallery
Justiniano 3, Madrid
About the exhibition
A shared image, transformed across continents. The figure of the Virgin Mary connects a remarkable diversity of materials, artistic traditions and communities during the first globalisation.
Gonzalo Eguiguren Gallery presents The Mantle of the People, an exhibition exploring how images of the Virgin Mary travelled and were transformed across the world during the first globalisation. The exhibition was held at Calle Justiniano 3, Madrid, from 17 December 2025 to 19 February 2026, with an opening on 16 December at 7 pm.
The exhibition begins with a central premise: the first globalisation transformed not only the economic and material circulation of the Iberian world, but also the ways in which people imagined the sacred. Representations of the Virgin - in stone, ivory, copper, lacquer, mother-of-pearl and paint - became a testing ground for cultural translation.
Each region reinterpreted her attributes and the techniques used to depict her, producing local variations that remained connected to their origins while retaining their distinctiveness. These many reinterpretations offer a privileged view of a profoundly diverse world.
Gonzalo Eguiguren has brought together works that reveal this striking material and technical diversity, from Huamanga stone to the enconchado paintings of New Spain and Philippine ivory. Through them, The Mantle of the People illuminates the global routes along which images, pigments and beliefs circulated, and the role of the communities that received them in convents, confraternities and homes.
The works form a symbolic map of the first globalisation: a world in which the Virgin served as a bridge between distant cultures, and Marian devotion allowed different peoples to recognise themselves beneath a shared gesture of protection.
The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue produced by an international team of specialists: Daniela González Pruitt, Gonzalo Eguiguren, Emily Floyd, Akemi Herráez Vossbrink, Ana Zabía de la Mata, Elisabeth Vite and Ewa Kubiak. Their research offers new readings of the circulation, adaptation and material qualities of Marian imagery in a global context, deepening our understanding of this far-reaching historical phenomenon.
