The “Lady of Guápulo” featured on this year’s
Christmas stamp has a long relationship with the
devotion to Mary in Spanish history. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, which provided
the image, states that it is a copy of the original
“Lady of Guadalupe,” revered in the Monastery
of Santa María de Guadalupe in today’s Cáceres
province of the Extremadura of Spain.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of Spain’s three
Black Madonnas. Carved of cedar wood, it is
just over two feet tall. Since the late 14th
century, it has been clothed in gold brocaded
robes, showing only the face and hands. In 1928
it was canonically crowned by Pope Pius XI,
with King Alfonso XIII attending.
Pope Gregory I gave the statue to Saint
Leander, archbishop of Seville, but Seville was
taken by the Moors in 712, and the statue was
hidden in the hills near the Guadalupe River in
Extremadura. In the early 14th
century, the Virgin Mary visited a humble
herdsman, instructing him to have the clergy dig
where she appeared; the statue was rediscovered and venerated in a little shrine. In
time the little shrine became the great
Guadalupe monastery.
An unknown painter created the Virgin of
Guápulo as a copy of the Virgin of Guadalupe
in 1584. It is named after the Church of Our
Lady of Guápulo – the first Marian sanctuary in
Ecuador.