The calavera catrina in mexican arts: a link between drawing and poetry, between tradition and revolution

Abstract

This article aims, through an analysis of the mural painting Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central by the artist Diego Rivera, to investigate the origins of the emblematic figure of the Calavera Catrina. Allegorical character, whose meanings reveal links between literary and visual arts. From the so-called literary skulls (calaveras literarias), poems inspired by the epitaphs dedicated and recited to commemorate the day of the dead; poetic forms that, although they date back to the colonial era, became popular expressions of social criticism in the pre-revolutionary Mexico, towards the end of the 19th century. From the symbolic meaning of the skulls and skeletons, images introduced by Baroque and Hispanic Christianity, redefined in Mexico under the influences of the Aztec tradition. This text tries to reveal in the Calavera Catrina the confluence of the ancestral reminiscences of the Nahuatl culture, the scope of European colonization and the spirit of the revolutionary struggle; from the illustrations by the engraver José Guadalupe Posada, its repercussions on the Mexican muralist movement and, finally, on the feminist literature that emerges from Frida Kahlo’s pictorial legacy