Multiplying Mary: Miraculous Images and Their Circulation Across the Iberian World

This project investigates the reproduction and distribution of miraculous images of the Virgin Mary across the Iberian world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While scholars have increasingly explored the role of venerated Marian images in shaping local religious communities, the significance of their copies in connecting distant geographies has remained largely overlooked. Following the itineraries taken by copies of the Sicilian Madonna di Trapani, the project demonstrates the central role of these objects in disseminating the Virgin's cult and reveals how imperial, religious, and commercial infrastructures of the early modern Spanish monarchy sustained this transcontinental circulation.

Housed in the Carmelite church of the Santissima Annunziata in western Sicily, the miracle-working marble sculpture became a major pilgrimage destination in the late fifteenth century, giving rise to a prolific local production of copies – alabaster statuettes, coral talismans, and oil paintings – that merchants, sailors, religious orders, and viceroys carried from Sicily to Malta, Sardinia, the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, New Spain and Peru. As these objects entered churches, monasteries, and private households, they assumed a range of functions shaped by the social and devotional needs of these new contexts. Functioning as cult images, protective talismans, diplomatic gifts, and collectors’ items, some copies retained explicit ties to the Madonna di Trapani, while others emancipated themselves from their Sicilian prototype to take on new titles, biographies, and devotional identities.

In approaching these copies as actors rather than peripheral products of artistic exchange, the project challenges traditional distinctions between “original” and “copy” as well as established notions of “center” and “periphery.” It rethinks copies as mobile, adaptive, and socially efficacious objects through which devotional, economic, and imperial networks were continually produced and reshaped across the territories of the early modern Spanish monarchy.