Didactics and Cosmos: Heaven and Hell in the Early Colonial Murals of Santa María Xoxoteco, Hidalgo, Mexico

Abstract

The 16th-century murals in the chapel of Santa María Xoxoteco, Hidalgo, are didactic artworks, painted within the first decades after the conquest with the purpose of converting the indigenous population to Christianity. In this article, I analyse the representations of heaven and hell in the murals, and I demonstrate how the artists chose motifs with meaning both in Christian and Mesoamerican cosmology. I discuss how the murals reflect a widespread method among the friars and the indigenous authors and artists of using Mesoamerican concepts and motifs to convey Christianity and facilitate the transition to the new religion. Firstly, I provide a description of the murals, and a review of their didactic function from the perspective of the Augustinian mission. I then turn to some of the lesser-studied parts of the murals: the paradise-representations in the vault – the flora, the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic creatures and the Solar-Christ – the mouth of hells on the sidewalls and the adjacent representations of Satan mixed with the characteristics of the tzitzimime, an Aztec class of deities branded by the early missionaries as devils.