Santa Rosa de Lima según Vásquez [Santa Rosa de Lima after Vasquez]

Fernando Botero is one of the most famous living Latin American artists. His fame and the ubiquity of his later works have somewhat overshadowed the mordant social and religious critique contained in his early works, of which this is a good example. Santa Rosa de Lima (1586–1617), the first Latin American to be canonized, is the patron saint of the Americas. She was known for her physical beauty, which she tried to deny through mortification and fasting. Legend has it that when her mother placed a crown of roses on her head to make her look beautiful for a social gathering, Santa Rosa used the thorns to pierce her skin in an echo of Christ’s suffering with the crown of thorns. That moment of mortification is represented in this painting, which is a reinterpretation of a famous posthumous portrait by the Colombian painter Gregorio Vásquez Ceballo (1671–1711). Botero’s respect and admiration for Old Master painting is evident in his handling of paint in this work, which subtly translates the seventeenth-century religion and conventions of Vásquez into the present.