After 501 Years, We Can Finally See the Face of the Mother of the Santo Niño de Cebu, Thanks to A.I.
Which Begs the Question: What Makes an Image Marian?
The Christianization of my ancestors started 501 years ago.
The first crew to circumnavigate the globe landed in my hometown, Sugbo, in 1521. They were the first Europeans to have reached the island, which later came to be known in Spanish and English as Cebu. Their captain, Ferdinand Magellan, entered our world with both violence and diplomacy. He played a political chess game with our local ruler, Rajah Humabon. Magellan was a master navigator and a courageous leader, but he was no politician. Humabon outplayed him and Magellan paid with his life.
The more peaceful side of this game was gift-giving. Humabon gave Magellan and his crew much needed provisions after narrowly surviving their traverse of the Pacific. Magellan gave Humabon and the rest of the ruling class some knives, mirrors and other exotic items from Europe. To Humabon's principal wife, Magellan gave a dark-skinned image of the child Jesus, the little king with the world at the palm of his hand.
The image's dark skin was not some attempt at what is now known in the Catholic church as "inculturation." There is a long history of dark-skinned sacred images in Europe, particularly in the tradition of Black Madonnas. In Barcelona, Spain, the most famous is probably Our Lady of Montserrat, which the Catalan locals affectionately call La Morenata.
The sacred brown child, now known as the Santo Niño de Cebu, followed this tradition. The sphere he holds in his hands, some commentators believe, reflects Magellan's convictions: that the world is indeed a globe and that he, the great captain, can navigate it around it.
The image of the Santo Niño played a vital role in the Christianization of my ancestors. It took the Spanish crown four decades to come back for good after Magellan's voyage. When they did so in 1565 and started the colonization, the Santo Niño already paved the way for our evangelization. It had become a local deity in those intervening decades.
The Spanish colonization of the Philippines ended three centuries later, in 1898. By then, the Philippines had become Christianized, and the Santo Niño had become the nation's most revered sacred image, especially in Cebu and its surrounding islands.
El Siglo de Oro
The age of discovery and conquest that brought Christianity to my ancestors also brought immense riches to the Iberian peninsula and ushered in the Spanish Golden Age. This was the age of Diego Velasquez, El Greco, Murillo and Cervantes. Some of the most iconic images of the Blessed Virgin were painted during this era.
When I first got interested in art as expressions of ideas living within and through a community of people, I started to experience what the prominent scholar of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, called "the specter of comparisons." He got this phrase from Jose Rizal, it turns out, as he explains in his book The Spectre of Comparisons:
I did not find a good name for this experience till almost quarter of century later, when I was in the Philippines and teaching myself to read Spanish by stumbling through José Rizal's extraordinary nationalist novel Noli Me Tangere. There is dizzying moment early in the narrative when the young mestizo hero, recently returned to the colonial Manila of the 1880s from a long sojourn in Europe, looks out of his carriage window at the municipal botanical gardens, and finds that he too is, so to speak, at the end of an inverted telescope. These gardens are shadowed automatically Rizal says maquinalmente and inescapably by images of their sister gardens in Europe. He can no longer matter-of-factly experience them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar. The novelist arrestingly names the agent of this incurable doubled vision el demonio de las comparaciones. So that's what was in 1963, I said to myself: the spectre of comparisons.
When will our Velasquez arrive?
The artists of the Spanish golden age indigenized Christianity. The mother of God became their mother. The Levantine Jew became a Spanish lady. Looking at these artworks, I couldn't help but hear the specter of comparison: when will our Velasquez arrive, the artist who will depict the mother of the Santo Niño?
There have been attempts from both popular piety and local artists. On the island where Magellan was killed, Mactan, there is a solid devotion to Birhen de la Regla, the brown-skinned curly-haired queen-mother of the Santo Niño.
Here's a painting of the holy family in a retreat house in Baguio city (I don’t know the artist):
What does the mother of the Santo Niño look like? The Cebuano artist Celso Pepito answers this by using what Catholics believe to be a snapshot of Mary taken by God himself: Our Lady of Guadalupe.
(At this point, you may be wondering what A.I. and Marian iconography is doing this newsletter for a book on cacao, Mexico, and the Philippines. It has to do with this image. I explain at the bottom of this post.)
Perhaps it will only be a matter of time and wealth before artists in Cebu and the rest of the Philippines will produce religious artworks with the same cultural impact as the artists of the Spanish Golden Age.
Perhaps it cannot happen in this era. There is a much lower probability for talent, opportunity, and faith to converge among our local artists today compared to 16th-century Spain. Likewise, our patrons are less religious and less powerful than the Spanish crown.
Perhaps there's another way.
Innovation Makes Stuff Cheaper
I'm just some guy in some third-world country. Yet I have greater access to information than Francisco de Vitoria. I have traveled farther than Magellan. And I have better healthcare than the most pampered Hapsburg. Innovations in the past 500 years have made the difference.
Recently, innovations in artificial intelligence also made the creation of images cheaper. Previously, such artworks required both innate talent and years of training from professional artists. Today, software like Midjourney and DALL-E can cheaply produce digital images that are hard to distinguish from ones made by human artists.
These images are cheap in the sense that they only need a few cents of computing power to produce. They are also cheap in the sense that they don't confer status to artists and patrons the way expensive paintings do.
Ang Santo Niño Ug Ang Iyahang Bulahan Nga Inahan
To those of us who are neither artists nor collectors, this accessibility is good news. A few years ago, I wondered what the face of the mother of the Santo Niño would look like. I thought I would need to wait decades before a critical mass of attempts from local artists would produce these images. With A.I., those paintings from speculative future decades were each made in minutes.
These A.I. image generators turn words you type in into images. I wrote "The mother of Santo Niño de Cebu" plus some descriptors like "glorious" as well as style-related words and—Holy Mother of God!—the results were astounding:
These images were created with version 3 of Midjourney. There were a lot of grotesque distortions with the hands, eyes, and noses. I fixed some of these using DALL-E's in-painting feature. I show the before and after for the first one, but the rest are images after retouching.
What makes an image Marian?
I got slightly obsessed with Midjourney and produced hundreds of these images. It has slot machine dynamics, so it is a bit addictive. Many results were distorted or meh, but you never know if the next one will be the jackpot.
Midjourney also produced some stunning images with similar prompts, but for some reason they didn't feel Marian:
It turns out putting a halo on a woman doesn't automatically produce an image of the Blessed Virgin. What are these patterns that I hold below my consciousness which make these images feel not quite right? Let me speculate:
I've never seen the intense fanatical expression in the purple one in any Marian image. The hard-edged Assassin's Creed vibe of the veil also stands out. This means I'm expecting a calm, motherly face and an outfit that expresses a kind of tenderness.
The second one doesn't feel Marian, probably because of the long flowing hair (usually seen on Magdalen in classical Christian paintings) and that orange security blanket she's holding.
The neckline of the third one is too low to be Marian LOL.
Let's see if these are true by retouching these images with DALL-E in-painting. We erase the sections we want to be replaced and let DALL-E fill in the blanks.
The proportions seem a bit off, and I still haven't figured out how to retain the style of the source image throughout the entire in-painted output, but this one to me is more Marian than the original image.
I found variations of the orange one, which doesn't have the flowing hair (as I've said, I've made hundreds of these images).
I don't know. They feel closer to an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but not yet quite there. I wonder why.
Here's the third one with a neckline pulled up by DALL-E.
Here's a variation of the same image but with a high neckline straight out of Midjourney.
Are these images of Mary, the mother of Christ? I don't know. I feel something is missing.
Realistic vs archetypal images
This exercise of trying to figure out what makes an image Marian gave me a greater appreciation of the work of artists. Creating a piece of art is not merely a matter of technique—i.e., the ability to create an image. Their craft involves many choices invisible to the eyes of non-artists, choices that speak to our intuition more than our reason. In the case of a religious image that follows a tradition, like Marian iconography, artists play inside invisible parameters that define that genre.
One parameter that surprised me is the level of realism. It seems that the more photorealistic an image is, the less Marian it feels, at least to me. Compare the images below. The first one, to me, looks like someone I'd meet in a Crossfit gym. The other is undoubtedly Marian, while also being African (I included "African" in the prompt). Perhaps sacred images need to depict archetypes (e.g., Mary as the archetype of a mother), which means they need to be at some level of abstraction (e.g., an abstraction of womanhood and not a specific woman).
Yet Mary is a specific woman. How do you depict a divine being who is simultaneously a young female Jew from 1st-century Palestine? And how do you do this in a way that helps viewers pray? The Marian images that have had the greatest popular devotion have less photorealistic styles than the non-Marian examples above.
Perhaps it also helps for divinity to be depicted as otherworldly. If she is too flesh and blood, she cannot be someone who transcends space and time.
Changing my mind on white madonnas
This realization gave me a new perspective on white-skinned depictions of Mary. The classic nationalist take is that their popularity in the Philippines is another manifestation of "colonial mentality," similar to the billion-peso industry of skin-whitening products.
Perhaps the impulse that leads pale Spaniards to pray to black madonnas is the same one that leads brown Filipinos to pray to white madonnas. The otherness of Mary's skin color also expresses the otherness of divinity. Perhaps we can only truly venerate that which is not ourselves. After all, "being a Christian means essentially changing over from being for oneself to being for one another," as the Catholic theologian Joseph Ratzinger writes in his book Introduction to Christianity.
P.S. What does this have to do with Cacao, The Philippines, and Mexico?
This article is published in a newsletter for a book I'm working on about the cacao connection between the Philippines and Mexico. I didn't expect this A.I. exploration of Marian iconography to end up here, and I was not planning to include the religious dimension in the book. However, A.I. is changing my mind.
This is my first update in this newsletter since my trip to Mexico last December 2021 - January 2022. I visited places not even my Mexican friends knew about, like Comalcalco in Tabasco and Tamazulapam del Progreso in Oaxaca, to follow the trail of cacao. I talked to all sorts of people involved in cacao and chocolate—from farmers to cafe owners to craft chocolate makers. Of course, I also visited Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
I was too overwhelmed by that trip to write about it immediately. There were too many threads to weave. Also, the trail of cacao grew cold. So I decided to focus on finishing the other book I'm writing, Atomic Project Management. However, as soon as I sent the first draft of that book to its editor, the cacao serendipities that I relayed in the first post in this newsletter started to happen again. I'll share them in future posts.
What I'll share here is this: Celso Pepito's answer to the question "what does the face of the mother of Santo Niño look like?" also crossed my mind. This connection between Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Santo Niño is not a mere juxtaposition of two icons across the Pacific. While the Santo Niño is an apt representation of the beginning of our Christianization, Our Lady of Guadalupe is a better symbol of the transformation of these islands of Austronesian tribes into a nation with a common lowland Christian Filipino culture. The missionary impulse of generations of clerics who came to work and die in the Philippines—at least until 1810—appears to have emanated from the strange events of 1531 in Nueva España.
In Comalcalco, Tabasco, the epicenter of cacao domestication, I was told about an image of Jesus, which they call "Señor de Cacao." This is the same image entrusted to a large family I belong to in Argao, Southern Cebu. We call it “Jesus de la Paciencia.” Every Holy Week, my relatives prepare the float that carries this image in a solemn procession around the town.
The Lord of Cacao eventually led me to wonder what Our Lady of Cacao would look like. So I asked Midjourney to create it. One thing led to another, and I ended up using DALL-E in-painting to create this mural depicting the cacao connection between Mexico and the Philippines.
The botanical and culinary exchange between Mexico and the Philippines rode on the coattails of the Philippine mission (while they gave us cacao, we gave them coconuts and distillation, which led to mezcal, so I think it's a fair trade!). The missionaries who came here already grew up drinking chocolate in Nueva España, so they just had to bring their favorite beverage to the Philippines. By the time of my grandmother, Filipino families were growing cacao in their backyards.
A.I. made me realize that I cannot tell the story of cacao without the story of the Blessed Virgin connecting Mexico and the Philippines. I’ll continue using Midjourney and DALL-E as I revisit and write about my trip to Mexico. A.I.-generated imagery will be another channel for listening to what this book wants to be.
Thanks for sharing. As Catholics, we believe that God made us in our image. With your article, it makes me believe humans also try to portray God in their own image so that they can relate.
Enjoyed this article! If I can give you a piece of constructive feedback, you refer at one point to Mary as a “divine being” which could be misunderstood. God bless!