If you walk through the “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—on view through July 28—you might be struck by many paintings and sculptures in their own right. But as you pass from gallery to gallery, you may also feel like you’re being guided through a conversation with everything you see.  

That kind of conversation—between works of art and viewers—is one that Fabiana Weinberg, FCLC ’07, hopes to facilitate in her role as senior exhibition designer at the Met.

“For me, it’s always a question of how do you breathe new life into these things every single time and provide the space for a dialogue with them?” Weinberg says. “I like the permanence of material culture, but also the ability to constantly think about it and marinate on it.”

The Harlem Renaissance exhibit gives people plenty to think about, including how to bring a “still-neglected art history out of the wings and onto the main stage,” as New York Times critic Holland Carter put it. The exhibit does that by featuring Black American artists from the 1920s to the 1940s like William H. Johnson, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Aaron Douglas—whose 1934 large-scale painting, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, inspired the soft color palette for the gallery walls—along with portrayals of the African diaspora by European artists like Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso.

“This show is really exciting because there are a lot of paintings but also ephemera and magazines and books and sculpture,” Weinberg says. “It’s a really immersive experience going through the galleries. A lot of these works are on view for the first time, and it’s really about expanding the canon.”

Weinberg majored in visual arts and art history at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and after graduating in 2007, she earned a master’s degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. She uses all that academic training to think broadly about the aesthetic and design choices that go into museum exhibits—from sketching design ideas, to using 3D-rendering software to move pieces of art around in a virtual replica of a gallery, to collaborating with tradespeople to build out the physical walls and cases and with curators to decide how to best showcase their selected works.

Her way of thinking about how people engage with art, though, began much earlier.

An Artistic Childhood and an Ideas-Driven Education

Weinberg grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As a kid, she trained to be a dancer, and her parents—a mother who was a photographer and a Fordham grad and a businessman father who became a high school teacher after earning a Fordham degree—frequently brought her to museums and exposed her to a wide range of performing arts.

At Fordham, she initially focused on natural sciences, but something clicked when she took an art history course—she decided to change majors. She says that Fordham’s core curriculum also gave her a foundation that added texture to her studies. “One thing I really always liked about Fordham’s approach is it was always ideas-driven, like, ‘What are you trying to say? What are you trying to do?’ And what it looks like—that comes later.”

After finishing her master’s in 2012, Weinberg moved back to New York and worked a variety of jobs across the design landscape, from scenic design to lighting design. The following year, she saw a posting for an exhibition designer position at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea. Although she had no experience in exhibition design, she heard back from the Rubin’s head of design, John Monaco, a former sculptor who saw promise in her application. She went on to spend four years at the Rubin before moving on to the Met in 2017.

‘Every Single Thing is a Decision’

In her time at the Met, Weinberg has designed or co-designed several premier shows, including 2020’s “Making the Met,” which looked back at the institution’s 150-year history; 2021’s Alice Neel retrospective; and “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” an Afrofuturist period room that opened in 2021 and remains on display.

Last December, she gave a group of Fordham alumni a private, behind-the-scenes look at “Africa & Byzantium,” which highlighted the artistic connections between these two geographically distant ancient civilizations. Before seeing the exhibit, which was darkly lit and made use of striking gold wall text, the alumni gathered in a conference room in the museum’s design department, where Weinberg demonstrated the Vectorworks 3D design software she and her colleagues use to plan out exhibitions.

“There’s still nothing like having a drawing that you see in your mind and then spatialize in a 3D model and then go into the gallery and see it being built,” she says of the work. “It’s thrilling.”

For the Harlem Renaissance exhibit, Weinberg says she tried to give viewers a sense of scale from room to room—and offer a contrast between some of the more esoteric written pieces on display and other sections with bursts of color and city life.

“At the beginning,” she explains, “there’s an introduction to the thinkers of the time, and we really wanted to create intimacy with these figures that really set the stage for what you’re going to see later. And then we have another gallery about city life that we wanted to open up. … So, using paint color and proportions of the space and dimensions, [we] give those different senses of scale between the intimacy of more domestic spaces and then more open, larger spaces.”

Weinberg says the breadth of her experience—from childhood museum visits to her understanding of space through dance—has helped her develop her eye for design. And while museum exhibition design wasn’t something she consciously thought about on all those childhood trips, it’s now front of mind for her. “When I go to museums, I can’t unsee how the spaces are designed,” she says. “Every single thing is a decision.”

“We hope to create a platform that will allow scholars and the general public to access data across museums through a simple and visually appealing online interface,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, a co-principal investigator for the project.

Several representatives from major museums and libraries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress, were present at an October project workshop at Fordham. Joining them were scholars from Fordham, Harvard University, MIT, the New School, Sciences Po of Paris, and University of Potsdam in Germany. The group has been collaborating continually to produce a final report for the NEH in March, after which they’ll seek additional funding for the project.

Connecting Museums and Their Data

Auricchio said that the project is similar to how museums are connected in the physical realm through the exchange of traveling works of art, but instead of art they would be exchanging research data, or metadata, spawned by their collections. Auricchio distinguished the two data sets by using museum “tombstones” as an example. Tombstones are the placards one sees beside a painting in a museum. The metadata would be the boldfaced information found at the top of the placard: the name of the artists, the years the artist lived, the name of the work of art, and the medium. The research data would be the paragraph below the metadata, which would include more nuanced and detailed information about the painting: its history, influences, and place within art history. Also included in the research data would be essays from exhibition catalogs.

“Only a fraction of a museum’s holdings are photographed for catalogs, the rest is represented through this research data and metadata,” she said.

This new platform would help foster “a new kind of knowledge production for scholars, artists, curators, educators, and an interested public,” she said.

Anne Luther, Ph.D., a co-principal investigator on the project, said that one of the primary challenges is that museums publish their data in silos, and even within institutions the internal databases don’t necessarily follow the same protocol. Luther, along with Auricchio, brought the NEH-funded project to Fordham.

“A museum may have one database system they are using, but from department to department they are using it differently,” Luther said at the October workshop. “The goal is to make this data available as a public good, but at the moment they’re [the data]  not speaking to each other.”

The challenge in dealing with large institutions is that the computer science protocols have already been established, in many cases over the course of years. Luther said there have been long-standing efforts that try to connect museum data internationally, but projects that have tried to impose new standards and new protocols have failed.

“We’re not trying to bring new standards to describing metadata, but rather we want to build, on one side, a protocol that would allow us to connect them,” she said. “We want to allow for the diversity of metadata on object descriptions within the museums to remain the same. We’re not asking the museum to rewrite. We’ll fish that out.”

Speaking the Same Language

Of course, “fishing” for common phases that describe a period, or a work of art, is also one of the great challenges for the project.

Sarah Schwettmann, a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, said a protocol layer that aligns metadata from museums’ digital collections could be the best route.  She noted that with machine learning, which is akin to artificial intelligence, there are increasingly more tools that allow computer scientists to work with and analyze metadata. She said the resulting platform needn’t be a simple search engine or website, but could be something more.

“We could build a protocol that actually asks, ‘Can we compare how different museums talk about items in their collection?’” Schwettmann said at the workshop. “This interface would allow one to interoperate specific terms and cultural language that the various museums have developed over time. This is important because each museum develops bodies of scholarship that are specific to that institution.”

“We want a protocol layer that points back to how individual museums talk about their objects and allows users to interact with and see the diversity in terminology,” she said.

One-Stop Research

Matthew Battles, associate director, metaLAB at Harvard University, noted that today art historians will often need to travel from several galleries, museums, and archives in order to gather the strands of a story about a particular artist, particular genre, and particular period.

“We want to facilitate the research activity of a scholar who wants to tell those stories across an institutional context so that rather than spending five years visiting 25 institutions, they could have access to the data of those various institutions in one place,” he said.

He noted that while diverse institutions feature objects from similar periods in history, they may interpret that history differently. As an example, he noted that all institutions agree there was a Byzantine era, though not all agree on a start date or end date. Where one researcher might want to have a numerically specific date, another might be interested in how various institutions have defined Byzantine.

He said that rather than proposing yet one more system to bring all of the museum systems into alignment, which hasn’t worked anyway, it would be better to provide a “roadmap” of how you can bring the various data into agreement or, if one chooses, eliminate the distinctions.

Battles said the NEH seed money—known as a discovery grant—was key, since the resulting research would be a public good that could impact the way stories are told at exhibitions, in elementary school classrooms, and in higher education, all of which would be “more richly informed by a broader array of resources.”

“The history of botany, and the study of plants, transpires in Latin,” Matthew McGowan, Ph.D., an associate professor of classics at Fordham, told the tour group, explaining how his own area of expertise led to his interest in botany.

It was the latest of many field trips McGowan has organized over the years to show where Latin persists in the modern world. He has led trips to the Morgan Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in addition to the botanical garden, which houses nearly 8 million samples of plant species—the world’s second-largest collection—across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

McGowan first connected with the garden and its experts in 2007; two of them co-led the tour. “I recognized when I arrived at Fordham 13 years ago that botany and the science of botany was the only discipline that I could determine where a knowledge of Latin and publishing in Latin was absolutely necessary,” he said at the outset of the tour, speaking to approximately 40 alumni and students in front of the garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

The tour began with stories of innovators from ages past. Its first stop was the library’s Rare Books Room, with its centuries-old copies of works by naturalists including Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swiss physician and horticulturalist known as the father of modern taxonomy.

“He wasn’t the first to come up with a system for organizing the plant world, but his was the first to stick, and be universally accepted,” said Stephen Sinon, the William B. O’Connor Curator of Special Collections, Research and Archives at the botanical garden. Linnaeus synthesized and collated existing names, and “Latin was the basis of his system,” Sinon said. “As a dead language, it could be universally accepted, and wouldn’t change as a living language would.”

Linnaeus’ two-word designations replaced wordier names, incorporating descriptions of the species that could run to more than a dozen words, said Robbin Moran, Ph.D., the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at the botanical garden. “Imagine trying to utter that every time you wanted to refer to a species,” Moran said.

For example, he said, the formal name of the agave plant was Agave foliis spinoso-dentatis mucronatisque (“Agave with leaves spinose-dentate and with a sharp-pointed tip”). Linnaeus provided an alternative for these long names—in this case, simply Agave americana.

McGowan noted that some plant names also contain words from other languages, including Greek and English, that have been “Latinized” for the sake of consistency.

A Dash of Controversy

Linnaeus developed his classification system in Species Plantarum—an original copy of which the alumni and students perused in the Rare Books Room—and an earlier work, Systema Naturae, with its sexual classification system that proved controversial, Moran said. Linnaeus based his classification on flowers, which he likened to a marriage: the flower’s pollen-producing stamens were the husbands and seed- and fruit-producing pistils were the wives. If a plant had, say, one pistil and six stamens, Linnaeus described it as having “six husbands and one wife in the marriage,” Moran said. Many of Linnaeus’ colleagues thought this scandalous, leading to some of his books being banned in parts of Europe, Moran said.

After perusing the rare books and their detailed, ornate illustrations of plants, the group moved to the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. Moran showed plant specimens and described their two-word names that incorporate genus and species, like Hirtella brachystachya, a South American plant whose short stem is reflected in its name, McGowan said.

Moran pointed out that when new species of plants were named, they were often accompanied by lengthier descriptions, also written in Latin. He noted that the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants no longer requires Latin for formal descriptions of new species. English has been allowed since 2012, in part to make species identification more efficient and stay ahead of extinction threats.

Turning the Page on Latin

Botanists still need to know Latin for the sake of reading older literature and composing names for new species, Moran said. McGowan said the move away from Latin descriptions “was probably inevitable, and need not be the cause for excessive lament.”

“What was originally meant to universalize the science of botany and simplify communication across the globe had in fact become a hindrance to actual botanists practicing their art in the face of other more pressing threats, like the disappearance of plant species due to climate change and deforestation,” he said.

“Latin is obviously still crucial for a genuine knowledge of botanical history and, more generally, of the history of science,” he said.

One attendee, Susan Snyder, FCRH ’86, a retired teacher, was amazed to learn about the medicinal use of plants in centuries past. “It made me worry, too … that we’re going to lose a lot of plants that could be medicines,” she said.

Another alumna, Mary Guardiani, UGE ’62, GSE ’92, also enjoyed the deep and wide-ranging presentation: “It was thoroughly enjoyable, because the presenters knew the topic intimately.”

The tour of the New York Botanical Garden was one of many cultural events regularly held in the New York area and around the country by Fordham’s Office of Alumni Relations. Upcoming events include museum tours, concerts, and theater performances, and more.

After the exhibit closed in February, the reproduction was carefully taken down and packed away. In November, it was given a new home in Fordham’s Butler Commons on the Rose Hill campus.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, called the gift a welcome addition to the University’s collection, one that will “touch our hearts, engage our minds, and lift our spirits.”

“It is an honor to once again partner with the Met, one of New York City’s preeminent cultural institutions, and to provide a permanent home to a reproduction of Michelangelo’s most ambitious and stirring masterpiece,” he said.

“Such a work embodies the divine grace of God. Its presence will remind us of our own Catholic heritage.”

The fresco, which Michelangelo painted between 1508 and 1512 at the behest of Pope Julius II, is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. Among its features are narrative scenes from the Book of Genesis, the Book of Maccabees, and the Gospel of Matthew. One of its most iconic images is the artist’s rendition of The Creation of Adam.

The gift is emblematic of both the Met’s and Fordham’s extensive roots in New York City. Father McShane first saw the fresco during an early morning tour of the exhibit arranged by Fordham Trustee Fellow Edward M. Stroz, GABELLI ’79, and his wife Sally Spooner. They were joined by Erin Pick, then a senior administrator at the Met, and Maria Ruvoldt, Ph.D., chair of the department of art history at Fordham.

He said he knew from the moment he entered the room that it would be a magnificent addition to Fordham’s campus. As chance would have it, the group crossed paths with Carmen Bambach, Ph.D., a curator at the Met who specializes in Italian Renaissance art. From 1989 to 1995, Bambach was also an assistant professor of art and music history at Fordham when Father McShane was dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

 “She looked at me and said, ‘You hired me at Fordham.’ I smiled and said that I had indeed hired her,” Father McShane said.

“After the tour was over, Erin, Carmen, and Maria worked on a proposal that we could place before the Met leadership to see if we could secure the piece for Fordham. Much to my surprise, we were informed a few weeks later that the Met approved our proposal.”

Quincy Houghton, deputy director for exhibitions at the Met, echoed the bond between the museum and Fordham.

“We are pleased that this painting will have a future life at Fordham, as another manifestation of the many scholarly connections between our two institutions, and that it will be widely used as a teaching tool,” he said.

“We look forward to seeing it in its new home.”

Ruvoldt said that although the fresco is among the most famous paintings in the world, it’s often seen in piecemeal fashion, such as the well-known section featuring the nearly touching hands in The Creation of Adam.

“Typically, when students learn about this in an art history classroom, they’re seeing a projection on the wall. They don’t have the experience of the entirety of the composition, and the experience, frankly, of just looking up at it, which sounds a little simple, but was key to the way the painting was meant to be understood,” she said.

“Michelangelo really got that the people who would be looking at it would be looking at it from below. So, it’s a unique experience for students to see it.”

Among the details one can observe in the full reproduction is evidence that Michelangelo actually realized, halfway through the production, that he’d have to rethink his approach. Ruvoldt said the latter sections feature visible changes in the scale of the figures, and compositions become simpler, so they’re more discernible from below.

Watch Ruvoldt give a guided explanation of the fresco reproduction.

Butler Commons, which is named for the founder of Marymount College and is just one floor above the University’s theology department, is an ideal location for it, she said, because it’s open to all. The University will open it to members of the campus community in January, and members of the public can arrange visits in the same manner they currently use to visit the University’s Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art.

“I picture it as something that not only art history professors can bring students in to look at it, but the theology department as well. The subject matter is the entire story of Genesis, the prophets, and the ancestors of Christ—it could be interesting as well for interdisciplinary investigation.”

The gift is only the latest collaboration between the two institutions. Last year, Fordham lent the Met Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi; the museum restored it and included its July exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque.

Update: While Butler Commons will remain secured, any member of the Fordham community who wishes to view the reproduction can contact the reception desk at Tognino Hall during business hours to have them open the room. During the weekends and after business hours, Public Safety will respond and open the room for any requested viewing. Members of the public can also make arrangements to view the artwork during business hours. No food or beverages are permitted in Butler Commons.

For decades, Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi had been hiding in plain sight at Fordham. This year, it was part of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art took in the exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque from late July to mid-October this year, one of the paintings they likely saw for the first time was The Adoration of the Magi. For more than a century, it had been seen only by visitors to the Fordham president’s office in Cunniffe House.

The 1683 painting depicts the famous scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham during the mid-19th century, shortly after the University’s founding, and likely first put on display at Fordham sometime around 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. During his lifetime, he exported paintings widely throughout Latin America. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early 17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, was touted as one of the highlights of the Met show, along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall masterpiece Villalpando also painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American art in the American Wing at the Met, said The Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine. “The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity and his mother’s is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

A Chance Rediscovery

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus long before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino studies at Fordham, stumbled upon a mention of it in the University archives while researching several other paintings in the Fordham collection.

“It must have been in 1999 or so,” she said, “when the president’s office asked me to look at four paintings in the council room that somebody thought might be from Latin America. It turns out they were not particularly good or notable paintings, but in doing a little research on them I found mention of a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando. That intrigued me because he’s an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like a Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

The document she found, an inventory of art at Fordham that was taken during the 1940s, described the Fordham Villalpando as being more than eight feet tall. But when she tried to determine its whereabouts, nobody seemed to have any information—until she mentioned the subject matter.

“That’s when someone said, ‘You know, there’s a big painting of the Epiphany in the president’s office.’ So people understood its imagery and the subject matter, although they had no recognition of the painter himself,” Mundy said. “Of course, Villalpando’s not exactly a household name, so it wasn’t until the Met show that people realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really important.’ I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

The show, Mundy said, was years in the making. After seeing the Fordham Villalpando, she contacted Clara Bargellini, Ph.D., an academic in Mexico who would go on to serve as a co-curator of the Met exhibit. “We had the painting photographed, and I would bring people in to see it, so word got out about this painting among specialists.”

An Extensive Restoration

Getting The Adoration of the Magi from Rose Hill to the Met was no simple task, however. “The painting was literally nailed into the wall, at least since the 1940s,” Mundy said. So in September 2016, the Met sent a team of specialists to Fordham, and they worked closely with Fordham’s carpenters to make sure the painting could be removed safely, without damaging either the 334-year-old artwork or the wall itself.

Because of its size—78 inches wide and 99 inches high—the painting was Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for nearly 10 months, during which time she traveled to Mexico to see other examples of Villalpando’s work during the same period in his life.

Before she could begin, however, she had to determine how best to proceed. “What’s varnish? And what’s an old paint? It’s a technical examination to be sure that we can separate the original from the later restoration, and that process takes some time,” she said. “Then we began the restoration work: cleaning the picture and cleaning off the old repairs, most of which were terribly discolored.”

Mahon said that the varnish coating the painting had to be delicately removed and replaced, and although the structure of the painting was in good condition when she received it, the backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced. “It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration was painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives.

A Broader Perspective

At a July 24 preview of the Met show for members of the media, Diego Gómez Pickering, consul general of Mexico in New York, said the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated 1 million Mexican Americans living in the New York metropolitan area, many of whom, like Villalpando, hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country. We cannot understand the fabric of American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said, calling the exhibition “a chance to build … bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies, and nations.”

Mundy said she’s pleased that the exhibition has called greater public attention to the “extraordinary quality and beauty and richness of Mexican painting.” She said she sees the show as part of a trend in which big U.S. museums are looking beyond traditional subject matter.

“Before, maybe 20 years ago, people thought Europe had it all. But there’s been a growing sense that art history and art heritage doesn’t just come from Europe,” she said. “And this of course reflects the changing demographics in the United States, where more people, American citizens, are coming from Spanish-speaking countries.”

As an example, Mundy cited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2016 show Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910 to 1950, which the museum described as the most comprehensive exhibition of modern Mexican art in the U.S. in 70 years. Mundy was teaching a course on modern Latin American art at Fordham at the time, and she decided to give her students the opportunity to see the show. “We hijacked a Ram Van and went down there on a Saturday,” she said. “This was a class that had a lot of art history majors in it, so they were really jazzed about being able to go.”

One of those students, Peter Vergara, called the exhibition a “cornerstone show for the Latin American art scene as a whole,” and he said seeing it and the Villalpando exhibit at the Met have been formative experiences for him.

“Seeing these enormous exhibits of Latin American and Mexican art in the U.S., and how they are promoting dialogue and cross-cultural interaction between American visitors and Mexican art, and also between Mexican tourists and American cultural centers, is exciting,” he said. “It makes the gaps feel a little smaller.”

Vergara, a Fordham senior who is writing his final seminar research paper on the Fordham Villalpando painting, knows firsthand the value of cross-cultural experiences. He was born in Washington, D.C., but moved with his family to Spain as a toddler when his father took a job in Madrid. He grew up speaking English and Spanish, and spent countless hours at the Prado Museum.

“As a child, I was there all the time. My parents and I would go together in the morning. We would stay for an hour or two, and then they would go to lunch or to see other things, and I would stay for hours,” he said. “My earliest memories are of just lying on the floor of the gallery.”

Vergara moved to the U.S. to attend Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island, and enrolled at Fordham in 2014. As a first-year student, he developed a passion for art history through two courses in particular, including one on colonization in Latin America, and with support from Mundy and other Fordham professors, landed a string of internships—at the Hispanic Society, the Cloisters, and Sotheby’s.

“I was aware of this world of Latin American art from freshman year, and now it’s shaping where I want to go with my career,” said Vergara, who has applied for a Fulbright study grant to Mexico, where he has been accepted into a master’s degree program at Universidad Iberoamericana.

A Painter and an Inventor

Vergara said his research paper would focus in part on the complex exchange of influences in Villalpando’s art. “While Mexico is heavily tied to Spain through the viceroyalty in Villalpando’s time, how much is European and how much is newer? How much are these artists breaking away and how much are they staying with tradition?”

He’s also focusing on the iconography in the work. “Some of it is very clear,” he said, “like we have wheat on the floor next to Mary and Jesus, and that’s a clear reference to the Eucharist.” But the meaning of other elements in the painting is less clear. For example, he said, “We might have a self-portrait of Villalpando near the back, where he’s looking around the column,” near the figure of Joseph, who is depicted wearing a green robe. “That’s a classic pose for a self-portrait,” he said, and it was common at the time for artists to include themselves in paintings of the Epiphany, to show themselves as “witnesses to the incarnation, among the very first.”

Vergara said that although the painting is “a big, big nod to Rubens,” an argument can be made that Villalpando is also staking a claim not simply as an imitator of the day’s European masters but as an artist in his own right. “He signs this one ‘Villalpando invento ipinto,’” Vergara said. “So he invented and he painted.”

Mundy called the inclusion of The Adoration of the Magi in the Met exhibit a long-overdue recognition for a masterpiece that for many years was hidden in plain sight. She’s especially taken by Villalpando’s ability to “paint the emotion in scenes,” she said. “You can see the response of all of the figures to the Christ child. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face.

“What’s also fabulous is the big crowd scene behind them,” she added. “Every member of the crowd who is peering in to see the Christ child has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

—Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this story.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art take in Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque, a new exhibition opening on July 25, one of the pieces they’ll see for the first time is the Adoration of the Magi.

For a little over a century, the painting has only been seen by visitors to Fordham’s Office of the President in Cunniffe House. The 1683 painting depicts a scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham shortly after the University’s founding and first put on display in 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early-17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, is being touted as one of the highlights of the show along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall canvas that he painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American Art in the American Wing at The Met, said Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine.

“The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity (and his mother’s) is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus for nearly a century before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino Studies, stumbled upon a mention of it in 2001 in the University’s archives while researching four other paintings.

“I couldn’t believe it, because Villalpando is an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like the Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

“I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

Because of its size, (78 inches wide and 99 inches high), it has been Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for the past 10 months. Mahon noted that over the years, the varnish coating the painting had become discolored and needed to be delicately removed and replaced. The backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced as well.

“It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration is painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives. As part of the restoration process, Mahon traveled to Mexico to see in-person other examples of Villalpando’s works from that same period.

At a July 24 press preview at the Met, Diego Gómez Pickering, Consul General of Mexico in New York, said the timing of the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated one million Mexican Americans living in the New York Metropolitan area. who, like Villalpando, primarily hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country, along with the African American, European and the Indian American community.  We cannot understand the fabric of the American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said.

“I hope you will enjoy the exhibition and have a chance to build with us bridges that will cross boundaries, bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies and nations, bridges that no wall will ever tear apart.”

Mundy called the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 15, a long overdue recognition for a masterpiece that was hidden in plain sight.

“Villalpando has a very special way of painting the emotion in scenes. In this one, you can see that response of all of the figures to the Christ Child, who is seated on Mary’s lap. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face, and the way she’s holding the baby,” she said.

“What’s also fabulous is, the big crowd scene behind them, and every member of the crowd whose peering in to see the Christ Child as he’s seated on his mothers’ lap has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

The painting was created in 1683 by Villalpando, a Mexican painter who is renown his work in cathedrals all over Mexico. It has been part of the Fordham University Art collection for greater than a century and will be returned to Cunniffe House once the exhibition closes.

–Mary Awad

But Michelangelo’s many drawings, and certain derivative works they inspired, also tell a compelling story about his life and the way art and artists were viewed in the 16^th century, says Maria Ruvoldt, PhD, associate professor of art history and a scholar of Italian Renaissance art.

For instance, there was an almost revolutionary idea afoot: that drawings were valuable works of art in themselves, she said. When others created art based on Michelangelo’s drawings, it was treated as if it had been produced by the master himself.

“Any design Michelangelo made, even if it was then executed by another artist, was considered a Michelangelo. It doesn’t matter that it’s not by his hand, because the idea has been reproduced,” Ruvoldt said. “In the 16^th century, value was created in a very different way.”

Michelangelo in Multiple

In the book she’s writing, Michelangelo in Multiple, Ruvoldt views these different conceptions through the lens of drawings that Michelangelo produced as gifts for Tommaso de’Cavalieri, a young nobleman he was infatuated with, as well as other works based on the drawings.

The drawings, ostensibly private, didn’t stay private for long, since they were passed around among Michelangelo’s immediate friends and in fact helped bind that group together. They

wound up generating additional art works that were highly sought-after themselves.

“They circulate within a relatively small circle of people, but almost immediately people outside of that circle are aware of them and want to get their hands on them, and they’re copied at an astonishing rate,” Ruvoldt said. Copies ranged from re-drawings to prints and ceramics to sculptures and paintings for elite patrons.

Michelangelo probably wasn’t surprised that this happened, Ruvoldt said. He was at the height of his fame, and the status of the artist in society was in flux.

“Michelangelo is asserting his autonomy, his ability to make things outside of the traditional client-patron relationship, at a time when people are starting to value the artist as a creative individual and not just as a workman,” she said.

Also in flux was the value of drawings themselves, which were starting to become prized as “residue” of the creative process.

“In a drawing, you can see the artist’s mind at work,” she said. “It’s a transitional moment, really, in the history of the medium of drawings. They start to get collected in this period for the first time.”

The drawings also offered a window into Michelangelo’s personal relationships. With their mythological subjects, they signified different things for different people, depending on how close they were to Michelangelo’s circle of intimates.

“The farther away you get from the immediate relationship, the farther away the images get from their very personal meaning, their very private meaning,” said Ruvoldt. “And they start to be applicable to a broader audience.”

One drawing dwells on the myth of Ganymede, a beautiful prince whom Zeus brings up to Mount Olympus to be his cup bearer, or lover. But the story’s other meaning, as an allegory for the elevation of the soul into heaven, provides cover for a racier interpretation that might prompt speculation about Michelangelo’s relationship with Cavalieri.

“Their meaning is debatable, and mutable,” Ruvoldt said. “If you say, ‘Well, they’re obviously about sex,’ I can say, ‘No, no, it’s an allegorization of the soul.’”

Lack of Copyright

The value created by the drawings was basically up for grabs, given the inchoate state of copyright protections at the time. After Cavalieri surrendered one of Michelangelo’s drawings to the Cardinal Ippolito de’Medici, the cardinal turned around and hired the gem engraver Giovanni Bernardi to make a series of rock-crystal intaglios based on it. “Nobody asks Michelangelo if it’s okay,” Ruvoldt said.

Bernardi then made bronze and lead copies to sell on his own, with his own signature on them. “Now they’re not just Michelangelo’s works, they’re now Michelangelo’s and Bernardi’s, and so they’re doubly valuable,” she said. “Michelangelo doesn’t have any ability to say, ‘Stop doing that.’ And that’s the thing that’s in flux, that idea of what constitutes authorship and what constitutes ownership of the design.”

“Those ideas that, for us, seem kind of settled were not at all settled,” she said.

During the 2014-2015 school year, while conducting research for Michelangelo in Multiple at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship, Ruvoldt decided to pursue a longstanding idea of hers: teaching a class entirely on-site, at the museum. She taught it for the first time last fall and will be teaching it again this year.

Spending so much time around the objects during the fellowship sharpened her appreciation for being in their presence. She sees this appreciation in her students as well, when they view ancient objects like a Krater—or Greek pot—in person rather than seeing them in a classroom slide presentation or in a textbook.

“They’re just kind of blown away,” she said. “They didn’t know it was so big, they didn’t know they could see the cracks in it and the places where it’s been repaired. That moment, I think, is a kind of ‘aha’ moment for them.”