Painting Purity and Painting Race: The <i>Virgen del Sagrario</i> in Seventeenth‐Century Toledo

ABSTRACT In a sermon published in Toledo in 1661, Pablo de la Peña y Lezcano described the Virgin Mary's ‘freedom’ from original sin as a resplendent whiteness. Sin, meanwhile, ‘called darkness and obscurity’, was a ‘stain’ never found in Mary, who was ‘born most free’ in her purity and lightness. Such chromatic, material and metaphorical descriptions of the Immaculate Conception frequently found their way into treatises published or drafted in Toledo in a period of increased concern over the perceived purity of blood of ‘Old Christians’ as compared to converted Muslims and Jews. By the seventeenth century, this discourse was increasingly applied to further differentiate between white Spanish Christians and enslaved Afro‐Hispanics. The Virgen del Sagrario— a Romanesque statue of the Virgin Mary with black skin that ecclesiastics recontextualised as a contact relic around 1584—stood in harsh contradiction to such textual descriptions of Mary's symbolic and racial whiteness. In this article, I examine a hitherto unstudied painting of the Virgen del Sagrario in light of shifting anxieties surrounding conversion and theological debates on the ‘stains’ of sin, slavery and race during the seventeenth century. I explore how sermons, religious tracts, theatrical sources and votive paintings disclose a concern for how sin and lineage appeared across the body chromatically, arguing that the newly popularised Virgen del Sagrario mediated local preoccupation with the appearance, durability and potential flexibility of religious and racial differences. In so doing, this article demonstrates how such ‘Black Madonnas’ participated in the discourses of race‐making in early modern Spain.