Fray Antonio Rodríguez Museum

The museum occupies the old sacristy—the room where vestments were kept and preparations were made for services. It is named after Friar Antonio Rodríguez, a Franciscan monk and architect who directed the construction of the present Guápulo Sanctuary in the middle of the seventeenth century. His name therefore applies to the museum hall as well: the vaults of the former sacristy were part of the complex he designed.

Between sixteen ninety-nine and seventeen oh six, the local Brotherhood of Our Lady of Guápulo commissioned twelve large canvases for this room. Miguel de Santiago, head of a renowned Quito art workshop, carried out the commission with his students. Such church work supported the whole workshop, so the assistants’ involvement is evident and the authorship of individual paintings is still debated.

The artists were to depict miracles recounted by local residents. The gravest of them, according to the inscription on one of the canvases, took place here during a solemn Mass in sixteen forty-six. An unnamed Indigenous woman entered the church, and contemporaries considered her possessed. She fell and lay as if dead, then rose healthy after the service had ended.

Miguel painted this scene about half a century later. The painting offers no independent evidence of a supernatural healing: the master reconstructed the event from an account accepted by the brotherhood. The patrons did, however, list high-ranking witnesses. Agustín Duarte, bishop and head of the local diocese, and Martín de Arriola, the region’s chief royal official, attended the Mass. The artist made their faces recognizable; the woman herself remained a small dark figure below.

Today this episode is called the only recorded exorcism in the Spanish colonial region centered on Quito. However, the inscription gives neither the exorcist’s name nor a separate rite of expulsion. It includes the woman’s fall, the end of the Mass, and her recovery. The brotherhood and the workshop turned an account passed on by residents into a visual confirmation of the local cult, intended for pilgrims and parishioners.

Of the twelve canvases, only this one shows the interior of the old church. In the background is the former altar with the original statue of Our Lady, which burned in the fire of eighteen thirty-nine. The statue is gone; the woman remains unnamed, but her dark figure is still in the very sacristy for which Miguel de Santiago and his students painted their cycle.