Resumen de Bastions of the Virgin: Francisco de Florencia’s Marian cartography of Mexico City
The Zodíaco mariano is a well-known colonial text from New Spain, originally penned by Francisco de Florencia in the 1690s but later modified, amplified, and published by Juan Antonio de Oviedo in 1755. This essay concentrates on Florencia's contributions to this compendium of Marian images, specifically the symbolism of the four Marian bastions in the section on the Archbishopric of Mexico. It argues that Florencia invented a Marian cartography of Mexico City by drawing upon early modern Marian atlases, Marian chorography, and quadripartite descriptions of Mexico Tenochtitlan and Mexico City in colonial chronicles. The Marian bastions he imagines for the viceregal capital—the Virgins of Guadalupe, Remedies, Bala, and Piety—were shaped by both Christian astrology and cosmological visions of urban space shared by both the Mexica and Spaniards.
