(jazzy piano music)
- [Lauren] We're at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City
in a gallery devoted to the art of the Spanish Americas.
And we're looking at several paintings
of the Virgin Mary with these elaborate golden crowns.
And we're standing before an actual crown
that is gold and covered in emeralds.
- [Beth] This is actually five pounds of gold
and more than 400 emeralds.
This is a fabulous object,
but also displays the incredible workmanship
of the craftsmen who made this.
- [Lauren] This is the Crown of the Virgin
of the Immaculate Conception from Popayan
in what is today, Columbia.
And the crown has an interesting story,
largely because of the materials it's made of,
but also because it was constructed
over several different periods of time.
- [Beth] So at this moment in history
when the crown is created,
the country we know today as Columbia and adjacent countries
were part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
This is a crown that was not made for an earthly ruler,
but for the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven,
a sculpture, in fact, that was kept
at the cathedral in Popayan.
This crown would've dressed the Virgin Mary
when she was taken out on a procession.
- [Lauren] This is what we could call
a votive crown or a votive offering.
It was gifted to the Virgin at Popayan
after she supposedly helped to protect the city
against sickness, against smallpox
and other things like famine.
Members of the community came together
and paid to have this crown made as a sign of their thanks
and as a way of demonstrating their piety, their reverence
for the Virgin.
And so this would have been one of many objects
gifted to this particular statue of the Virgin Mary.
This was common in the Spanish Americas,
as well as in Spain and other parts of Europe
to dress sculptures.
- [Beth] And it's not surprising
that at the very top of the crown we see an orb,
which is a symbol of royal power
and on top of that, a cross,
so this idea of Christ's dominion on Earth.
- [Lauren] And then of course his mother is the Virgin Mary
and she is the Queen of Heaven,
which is why she wears a crown to begin with.
The original portion of the crown
dates to probably the early 17th Century,
and that is the cross and the orb.
The diadem that's at the bottom
dates to the mid to late 17th Century,
and then the arches date to the later 18th Century.
So what we're seeing is a crown that was important
for the Virgin of Popayan,
that people continue to add to it
rather than say, melting it down
and creating something else.
We look closely at the diadem, we see these foliate designs,
what look like leaves and floral designs
that are intertwined in this intricate design
around the base.
And then we have clusters of emeralds together
that almost give the impression of abstracted flowers.
- [Beth] And the diadem was created
using a technique called repousse.
So it was hammered from behind to create
the volumes that we see in the gold and the patterns.
- [Lauren] And we know from artistic and scientific analysis
that the arches were made using a different process
which helps us to date them to a leader period.
But if you're looking at it,
you can see some of those subtle differences
in the way that it's been fashioned.
At the same time, it really does give the impression
of this complete whole,
even though these different parts of the crown were made
at different periods of time.
- [Beth] So this was part of a ensemble
for the Virgin on special occasions.
We can imagine her also dressed in pearls and silver.
- [Lauren] And she would be gifted luxurious clothes
and other types of items.
This is a crown
that she would not have worn on a daily basis.
If you had gone to the cathedral,
you wouldn't have seen her wearing
all of these things at once.
They would have been placed on her for special feast days,
especially Holy Week, when the sculpture
of the Virgin at Popayan would have been processed
through the streets.
Keep in mind that here in the museum
we're seeing this crown static.
It's not moving, it's behind a glass case,
but when it was placed on the sculpture that was moving
it would've been activated and animated in different ways.
Hanging from some of the arches at the top
we actually see emeralds that would've moved
as Virgin was processed.
- [Beth] This is an object that held importance
for a community over a long period of time.
And we get a sense of how it was used
when we look at paintings of statues of the Virgin Mary
also wearing a crown.
- [Lauren] And if we talk about the crown
in terms of its production, the materials
and the labor that went into making it,
we could talk about how gold working and emerald mining
has a very long history in Columbia
that predates the arrival and invasion of the Spaniards
in the 16th Century.
In this area of Columbia
there were many indigenous populations
that for a very long time made objects in gold
and mined emeralds.
So this longer history of gold extraction predates
the Spaniards.
- [Beth] As does the use of emeralds.
- [Lauren] These were already local traditions
that were radically transformed with the arrival
of Europeans and the subsequent conquest that occurred.
We know from early colonial sources,
emerald mining was very time-consuming,
very difficult and challenging work.
It is typically indigenous laborers
who are doing that mining, but as the result of epidemics,
of overworking, you also have an influx
of enslaved Africans work in the mines.
And Columbia is today known for having
the world's finest emeralds.
They are this beautiful, rich green.
It is part of what made the region
that included Popayan so wealthy
throughout the Spanish colonial period.
- [Beth] These emeralds were making their way
across the world to the Mughal Empire in India.
There was a huge market for emeralds globally.
- [Lauren] The mining of gold and emeralds
was really important for that global flow of materials.
We do have to remember the human cost
of producing something like this, as well.
(jazzy piano music)