The Sanctuary at Atotonilco, about 8 miles north-ish of San Miguel de Allende, was started by Father Luis Felipe Neri de Alfaro in 1740. An artist from Querétaro, Martin Antonio Martínez de Pocasangre, painted Father Neri's poems and sermons on the walls of the sanctuary. And on the ceilings. And the doors. Inside and out. What's even more impressive than an artist and his crew painting every available surface of a church, is how much of it remained after some 250 years. Especially considering that the structure was built above a warm spring which sort of accelerates deterioration of things like, oh I don't know, PAINTINGS.
GB and I stumbled into good fortune the day we decided to visit the Sanctuario. A few days previously the Sanctuario had been designated a World Heritage site. This is a Big Deal, as it opens up new funding opportunities for continued restoration and preservation of Pocasangre's paintings and the Sactuario as a whole. (Pocasangre's work has been compared favorably to Michelangelo's in The Vatican's Sistine Chapel.) In celebration of the World Heritage designation, the Sanctuario opened the restored side chapels to a group of visitors – us included. Awesome.
It's not just the state of preservation or the quality of the recent restoration that's important; the Sanctuario is also historically significant because it was where the martyrs of the revolution were baptized. Ignacio Allende, one of the hero/martyrs of the revolution, was married here. And on September 15, 1810, Father Hidalgo, Juan Aldama and Ignacio Allende stopped here with their revolutionary army and received the Sanctuario's priest's blessing for their cause. The revolutionary army took a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe from the church wall, appropriating her as the patron of the war for Mexican independence from Spain.
Photos (mine, anyway) do not do Pocasangre's work justice. Here, I've tried to
take some closer views of a few details of his art. On the left, we have a cluster o' demons romping around the ceiling of the fully-restored left chapel; and over to the right we have a seashell niche in the silver-encrusted secret room behind the altar in the right chapel. We were told that in order to preserve the artwork, these two chapels are ordinarily not open to the public so if you travel to Atotonilco to see the Sanctuario, plan a bit ahead, make some inquiries, and see if you can get special permission to view something you will never see anywhere else n the world.
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