The Virgin of the Navigators

For the Catholic devotion, and statues, see Our Lady of Navigators.
The Virgin of the Navigators, by Alejo Fernández, 1531–1536, oil on panel.

The Virgin of the Navigators (Spanish: La Virgen de los Navegantes) is a painting by Spanish artist Alejo Fernández, created as the central panel of an altarpiece for the chapel of the Casa de Contratación in Alcázar of Seville, Seville, southern Spain. Scholars date the painting to sometime between 1531 and 1536. Carla Rahn Phillips has suggested that it represents Christopher Columbus as a European magus-king reinforcing "the notion that the Spanish Empire represented the fulfillment of biblical prophecy to bring the Christian message to all the peoples of the world.[1]

The painting is a version of the common iconography of the Virgin of Mercy, in which the Virgin Mary protects the faithful under the folds of her mantle. This was well known from many paintings such as the Madonna of Mercy by the Italian painter Piero della Francesca (1445). In this iconography, the Virgin Mary is always the largest figure in the picture, towering above those being protected.[2]

Sometime before 1536, officials at the Casa de Contratación commissioned the painting as the central panel of an altarpiece that they installed in the Hall of Audiences, so that the room could also serve as a chapel.

  1. ^ Phillips, Carla Rahn (20 November 2018). "Visualizing Imperium: The Virgin of the Seafarers and Spain's Self-Image in the Early Sixteenth Century *". Renaissance Quarterly. 58 (3): 816. doi:10.1353/ren.2008.0864. ISSN 0034-4338. S2CID 233339652.
  2. ^ Leslie Levin, 1998 Metaphors of Conversion in Seventeenth-century Spanish Drama ISBN 1-85566-057-1 page 28