Hermenegildo Bustos

Octavio Paz

As I write about the painter Hermenegildo Bustos, I think about his story again, and again I am amazed. In any one event we see the effects of other events that combine with it, shape it, even create it. Historians may argue interminably about why Rome fell into decadence (or whether the idea of decadence is relevant to Rome), but none of them would deny that each historical event results from the combined action of other events and causes.

In the art world, relationships among traditions and schools, society and personality, are no less causal, no less deterministic. Yet whenever we deal with politics and social change or change in the arts and the world of ideas, we find that history resists rigidly deterministic explanations. In any historical phenomenon there is always an unforeseen element - the ancient goddess Fortune, chance, temperament. But the appearance of the painter Hermenegildo Bustos in the tiny village of La Purísima del Rincón midway through the last century confronts us with a truly unusual event. Bustos is neither the heir to, nor the founder of, a pictorial movement: his art begins and ends with him. He had no masters, no colleagues, no disciples; he lived and died isolated in a town lost in the heart of Mexico, removed from important artistic movements. Nevertheless, Bustos's painting -profoundly conventional and profoundly personal - is part of the great tradition of portraiture, and occupies a unique place within that tradition.

Bustos reminds us that God works in mysterious ways, the kind of explanation that since antiquity has scandalized rationalists. It was Porphyry who mocked Jews and Christians alike for believing in an omnipotent God who would work miracles such as stopping the sun, parting the sea, or transforming stones into loaves of bread. "No, God could never desire anything or do anything but that which is true, just, and good. God cannot negate the axioms of geometry: to do that would be to negate himself. " I don't dare to take. issue with the philosopher, but the fact is that the unexpected surrounds us and challenges our rationalism every day. The unexpected not only borders on the unexplained but at times drifts into the inexplicable. We neutralize it with words like fortuitous, accidental, and exceptional. These terms reveal our perplexity but do not solve the puzzles. They are techniques for classifying abnormal facts without understanding them. Bustos's painting seems inexplicable from the perspective of art history. But it is a visible reality with a normal rather than miraculous origin: a man named Hermenegildo Bustos, about whom we not only know a few facts and anecdotes but whose self-portrait (one of his masterpieces) we possess. Isn't that enough?

About twenty miles from the city of León in the state of Guanajuato there are two small towns adjacent to one another: La Purísima (Virgen) del Rincón and San Francisco del Rincón They were founded in 1603 and populated with Otomí and Tarasco Indians. The population remains predominantly Indian, although native languages have been replaced by Spanish. It is a rich agricultural and commercial region. In the past it was also a silver-mining center: in the sixteenth century the three largest silver-mining centers in the world were Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Potosí (Bolivia). The mining boom lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Agriculture, on the other hand, even now is the mainstay of the population. "The Rincón towns," says Raquel Tibol in her monograph on Bustos, "enjoyed stability without sharp variations - neither abject misery nor spectacular prosperity. La Purísima grew more rapidly than San Francisco del Rincón and in 1860 could boast some 16,000 inhabitants. Aside from the plantations around it, the town had orchards, a flourishing crafts industry, small and medium-size properties, merchants, and various members of the clergy. There was a primary school, an orchestra, and an amateur theatrical group directed by the priest. Parades and religious processions were common. There was no electricity, and La Purísima communicated with León by means of a stagecoach service.

While the citizens of La Purísima were affected by the turmoil of the nineteenth century and the battles between conservatives and liberals, they were first and foremost traditionalists. The nucleus of their traditionalism was Catholicism in its Hispano-Mexican version: ritualism, intense collective piety, the cult of icons, and an abundance of religious holidays and ceremonies. The Church, as much in its material nature as in its institutional and psychological identities, was a refuge, inspiration, guide, and conscience. The family served as an axis for town life. It was a measured life, occasionally shaken by violent passions -principally lust and jealousy. Elopements were not uncommon, nor were kidnappings, nor bloody vengeance taken by fathers, brothers, and dishonored husbands. Along with these passions and their ravages there were also the marvels and horrors of nature: eclipses, floods, droughts, and comets. All these aberrations, both the human and the natural, were accounted for by traditional values and doctrines. Thanks to the Church, the world, even in its disorder, possessed coherence and sense. Religion enabled the town to communicate not only with the vast supernatural and natural forces but also with the past and present of Mexico. The history of the nation blended with the history of the Catholic Church. Finally, through its institutions and doctrines, but above all by means of its icons - the crucified Christ and his Mother, the prophets, the martyrs, and the saints - the Church linked La Purísima and its people to Rome and to Europe. The first things Bustos, a pure Indian (as he proudly described himself), ever saw were reproductions and imitations of European religious icons.

Though Hermenegildo Bustos's birth records are lost, we know from a statement written by his father that Bustos was born on 13 April 1832. The scrupulous Jose Maria Bustos recorded the day his son was born (Wednesday), the hour (11:30 a.m.), the names of the midwife, godparents, and the priest who baptized him. The only name he left out was that of the mother (Juana Hernandez)! Jose Maria Bustos was the parish bellman, and Hermenegildo also had some connection to the Church. We don't know if he was the parish sacristan, as some critics assert, or if he worked on the restoration of altars, paintings, and sculpture. He apparently also worked with the adornment and clothing of statues, and as a decorator of the church during religious holidays. Hermenegildo divided his life between morning work in the parish and afternoon professional labors in his small atelier. While it may be difficult to establish a chronology for his life and his works, it is not at all difficult to develop an impression of his character and his activities. Some of his personal papers exist, among them a calendar from 1894 in the margins of which, in fine, small handwriting, he noted with maniacal impartiality the events of each day, local scandals, and above all natural phenomena - cloudy weather, frosts, rains. His tasks and concerns in other years cannot have been much different: life flowed with the regularity and consistency of the rosaries that passed through the fingers of the devout. Most important, Bustos made a profound impression on his contemporaries and left behind a legend that has lasted until our time. His fervent and fantasizing biographer Pascual Aceves Navarro attributes to him an almost infinite list of talents, and although it is hard to believe Bustos was an architect, a theater director, and a watchmaker, Aceves Navarro may not be exaggerating all that much. Bustos's vocation was painting, but in the traditional town where he lived, specialization and division of labor had not reached today's extremes. When he was twenty-two years old, Bustos married Joaquina Ríos, who was barely fifteen. It was a childless marriage, stable, but perhaps not entirely happy: Bustos was a womanizer who had several lovers. With one, María Santos Urquieta, he had one or two children. He owned a small freehold with fruit trees and vegetable gardens, which he tended himself with the help of one or two day laborers. Lust and eccentricity: he lived with an owl, a dog, and a talking parakeet; these he described, tongue in cheek, as his whole family. He was a true bricoleur and the variety of his work and activity never ceases to surprise me: iceman, quack doctor, gardener, moneylender, musician, tinsmith, building foreman, carpenter, sculptor, and painter.

In summertime Bustos and his wife made lemon ice, which he would peddle in the streets. He built walls, repaired roofs, and reconstructed the chapel dedicated to Christ's three falls on the Via Crucis; he was a pawnbroker; he bred leeches and rented them out; his infusions and herb concoctions (aromatic and medicinal) were celebrated; he strummed the guitar, plucked the mandolin, played the saxophone, and was a member of the municipal band that played every Sunday in the plaza; he constructed a water clock and corrected the parish sundial; he excelled at carpentry and in addition to tables, beds, chairs, and sideboards, he made coffins: he made his wife's and his own - which he kept in his shop until his death. He was a tailor: he cut and sewed his clothes according to the dictates of his clerical-military fantasy. He also cut and fit the clothing of the Virgins and altar saints. He was a tinsmith: as director of the show battalion that paraded through the town on religious holidays, he made the armor, the shields, and the helmets of the soldiers and officers. He was a goldsmith and would make necklaces, brooches, and rosaries. He sculpted and carved: some of his wood sculptures of saints, Virgins, Christs, and one Ecce Homo in the parish church of La Purísima remain. He also left a series of masks used in the Holy Week pageants. He wasn't learned, but his piety - he went to Mass every day and took communion frequently - obliged him to read devotional books and, in time, to pick up a smattering of Latin. He was famous for his caustic humor. He proclaimed that there were only three notable people in this world: the Pope (Pius X), Porfirio Díaz, the dictator of Mexico, and Hermenegildo Bustos, painter and know-it-all. His clothes - or rather, his uniforms -were his own invention. His outfit for important occasions was made up of a green frock coat of military cut with gold buttons, three crosses, and his own name embroidered on the collars, another two crosses on the chest, a red stripe, and cowboy-style trousers. The uniform of a half-republican, half-heavenly militia. He wore an Indo-Chinese straw hat; among his musical instruments was a Chinese pi-pa -how the devil did he get it? There are two photographs of Hermenegildo and his wife, Joaquina. One is inscribed: "The priest Gil Palomares took this photograph on April 13, 1901." Hermenegildo was sixty-nine years old and his wife sixty-two. In one photo the couple is seated, in the other (the better of the two) they are standing. Joaquina's clothing is typical of the time and place: a long skirt and a wide rebozo, or scarf, that covers her head and half of her body. All we can see is her face: serious, deeply wrinkled, and decidedly Indian. Hermenegildo is wearing his fancy outfit, the green frock coat, which, half open, reveals a pleated shirt, a vest, and a fringed sash. Hermenegildo wasn't very tall; perhaps to compensate for that defect he rests his left arm on his wife's shoulders in a gesture simultaneously familiar and imperious. His head held high; his deep eyes half-closed as if to see the camera lens better; a deep crease between his brows; his frown, geological creases, beginning with the wrinkle that majestically descends his nose; his mustache thick and showing gray; his lower lip thick, his chin firm, his cheekbones prominent, his forehead wide, his hair thin and very short. His wife's face reveals resignation, fatigue, and a certain impassivity; his is energetic and intelligent: bronzed skin, powerful muscles and bones. It is an Indian face but it is also a Tartar's. The face of a man-bird who sees from afar and penetrates deeply into things. Hermenegildo Bustos died six years after this photograph was taken, in 1907, at the age of seventy-five, one year after his wife. (When she died, he asked a neighbor to help him wrap her in her shroud; then he locked up the house without letting anyone in and spent the night alone with her.) With his usual serenity and reserve, he left instructions on how he was to be buried. Eccentric, capricious, avaricious, diligent, self-centered, astute, religious, sarcastic, imaginative, ceremonious, lustful, devout, perspicacious, penetrating: a genuine rara avis or, as the seventeenth century would say, a monster.

We wouldn't bother to remember Hermenegildo's eccentricities or his abilities in the mechanical arts - both talents glorified by local mythologizing - if it weren't for his excellence as a painter. In life he was admired by the citizens of both La Purísima and San Francisco del Rincón, and he must have been known beyond these two towns because he painted portraits of people from other villages nearby. Nevertheless, his fame was limited to the area around La Purísima, His clientele was exclusively local, but not restricted to a single social class. Among his subjects are churchmen, merchants, farm owners, artisans, families of modest means, and many women of different classes and social condition: young ones, wives, widows, the owner of a pulque brewery, devout ladies. All were simple people.

Bustos painted in three genres: oils and murals with religious subjects, ex-votos, and portraits. He was paid a small amount for all three kinds of work, so we may safely say he was a professional painter. He always insisted - out of humility or as a way of challenging others? - that he was an amateur. Not many examples of his religious painting remain. This is not strange: he was a careful, slow painter who did not produce a great deal. In addition, he probably received few commissions outside of La Purísima and San Francisco del Rincón: he wasn't famous enough to come to the attention of the high-ranking prelates of León and Guanajuato. Besides, in those years the Church had ceased to be a great patron of the arts. Among his religious paintings there is a curious allegory, Beauty Conquering Force, which depicts a lion and a beautiful maiden; the maiden, armed with a huge scissors, is cutting off either the lion s mane or his claws. Is this an evocation of Saint Mary of Egypt? Gossip says the maiden is Bustos's girlfriend María Santos Urquieta. His murals at the golden altar in the parish church of La Purísima represent scenes from Christ's passion and were not entirely painted by Bustos, but "touched up, as he says in an inscription. But, as Raquel Tibol wisely observes, "touched up" to Bustos "means something more than mere restoration work. He adds elements which are of his own invention. For example, in the panel of the Via Crucis where Jesus meets the Virgin, the faces of the women were all painted by him." Those faces could only be women from La Purísima. In the triangular panels below the cupola of the parish church, there are four paintings: Saint Bernard, Saint Ildefonso, Saint Bonaventure, and Saint Alphonse of Ligorio. They are his; beneath Saint Alphonse is inscribed: "Hermenegildo Bustos painted them, an amateur painter from this town. "Neither the oils nor the murals are memorable; they are impersonal examples of the religious painting of the era, copies of European copies. The ex-votos are better. They were painted on sheet brass in small scale and represent events worthy of memory. The donor gives thanks to the Virgin or to a saint who saved him from grave danger -falling down stairs, being attacked by thieves, being charged by a wild bull, or a bad fever. From the eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth, thousands of ex-votos were painted in Mexico. Bustos's ex-votos conform to the unwritten laws of the genre. They are popular paintings in the strict sense of the word and are thus distinguished from his religious painting, which lies somewhere between popular and academic painting. Bustos usually followed the path of least resistance, which means that his ex-votos (and many attributed to him are by other hands) are in no way different from hundreds of others. But several of Bustos's ex-votos are more than examples of a traditional and stereotyped art. These captivate us, not because of the naive quality of the drawing or the subjects (rather monotonous miracles) but with the energy and veracity of certain faces. The ex-voto becomes an authentic and intensely personal work of art: the portrait of a unique person.

A competent painter of traditional religious pictures and of ex-votos in the folk tradition, Bustos should be remembered as an extraordinary portrait painter. In his religious paintings Bustos really is an amateur; in his portraits he shows himself to be a minor master. Minor because of the limitations of the genre, because of the small number, and size, of his paintings; a master because of their intensity, their penetration, and often enough because of their perfection. Looking at these paintings we are moved to ask where, how, and with whom Bustos learned the art of painting. I'm not sure I have the answers, but I can at least try to locate the questions in their proper historical context.

After his death, Bustos was almost completely forgotten. Like the rest of his nation, La Purísima was enveloped in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Around 1920, the country at peace once again, we Mexicans began to scrutinize our past: we were looking for clues about what we had become, not what we once were. We were looking for ourselves. Popular art seemed simultaneously to be evidence of what we were and a confirmation that the nation had survived. In 1933, the painter Roberto Montenegro published Mexican Painting 1800-1860, which contains a portrait of Joaquina Ríos (Bustos's wife) by an anonymous painter. (Raquel Tibol's monograph includes a succinct account of the rediscovery of Bustos and his painting.) The error was quickly noted: Francisco Orozco Munoz had already begun his research and a few years later critics and students of Mexican culture began to discover Bustos's life and work. Orozco Muñoz's action was decisive in this process. Born in San Francisco del Rincón, he was a poet and diplomat. He lived for many years in Belgium. There he married an intelligent woman who was also an art lover: Dolly van der Wel. In Belgium, Orozco Munoz was able to study the Flemish painters of the fifteenth century, especially Jan van Eyck, his favorite. Perhaps the fortunate combination of his admiration for Flemish painting and his love of his native land - and his intelligence and sensibility - ensured Orozco Munoz 's memory of the small paintings on sheet brass he had seen in childhood at home and in other homes in San Francisco del Rincón. One sign of the connection he established between the Flemish portrait painters and the modest Bustos is that when he discovered on the back of Bustos's self-portrait the inscription "I painted myself to see if could," he immediately connected it with van Eyck's motto "Als ik Kan" (As I Can). Orozco Munoz succeeded in collecting a considerable number of Bustos's works, but he never wrote about him. Nevertheless, almost everything written on Bustos in that first period shows traces of conversation with Orozco Munoz. The few critics who did write about Bustos between 1930 and 1950 viewed him as a "primitive," although some of them realized how inappropriate the term was. There is nothing primitive or naive in works like the Self-Portrait (1891), the Woman with Flowers (1862), the portrait of Alejandra Aranda (1871), or the portrait of Francisca Valdivia (1856). Walter Pach astutely remarked that Bustos was not a "primitive" (what does that vague term really mean?) but in fact an autodidact: "a few books on the use of oils and on the mixing of colors (which he mixed for himself in the classic style) combined with the contemplation of the works of art that exist in any old town in Mexico, formed the technical background of his professional calling." In this seminal essay, Pach points out that in his early youth Bustos "attempted to take lessons" but, disheartened by the mockery of the other students, "he immediately went back to the country and solved the problems of art on his own." The source of this story had to be Orozco Munoz, who supplied Pach with all his information on Bustos. This information was vague, but in 1952 it became more precise. That was the year that Fernando Gamboa organized the first Bustos retrospective. The catalogue states that although Bustos had attempted to study painting in León with the master Herrera, "he abandoned this bad teacher after six months because instead of teaching his students, Herrera used them to do his chores." The source of this story had, once again, to be Orozco Munoz, who knew all the folktales of the Rincón district. I stress the oral quality of these folktales: no one has ever found any document that proves that Bustos was ever in the studio of the academic painter Juan N. Herrera. That he was is plausible given the proximity of León and La Purísima. Nevertheless it is hard to accept that a poor country boy like Bustos could enroll in an academy in León. What credentials could he have? Who would back him up? Who would pay the bills? In 1973, Gonzalo Obregón, a Mexican art historian, published an essay maintaining that Bustos was a disciple of Herrera . He contributes no documentary proof and bases his opinion exclusively on the closeness of León to La Purísima and on internal evidence: it is impossible that Bustos could acquire on his own the mastery of technique we see in his portraits. Obregón thinks Bustos studied for more than six months with Herrera because even Bustos's early portraits display a notable technical skill. This is true: the Portrait of a Priest (1850) and the Artist's Father (1852), painted when Bustos was between eighteen and twenty years old, are mature works. In the second the composition is both luminous and somber: the white shirt, the black coat, the dark shine of the hair, the bronzed skin, the mouth that seems to challenge us, the eyes that follow us as if from a distance and yet at the same time from nearby. According to Obregón, these early examples of Bustos's skill are evidence of a long apprenticeship. Bustos must have studied with Herrera between 1848 and 1851 (his sixteenth to nineteenth years). Later, he returned to his town, where "he would be alone, with no one to influence him, and his art would drift toward the popular." There is as well the economic factor: "His clientele in La Purísima couldn't pay as much as the well-off citizens of León. "For Obregón, Bustos regresses: left to himself, with a poor and ignorant clientele, Bustos went back to the popular although he retains a certain level of quality, which he owes to Herrera.

I find this thesis unacceptable for three reasons. First, the absence of documents: it's all supposition, even Bustos 's having spent some months in Herrera 's studio. Second, Bustos 's portraits, from the first to the last, are notable, often perfect: there are no great changes between the earliest and the last. From the beginning his awkwardness with figures and backgrounds is also notable, as is his clumsy use of perspective. The first thing the student in an academy learns, even before learning how to draw a face, is to draw the human figure and to master perspective. It seems improbable that the process could have reversed itself for Bustos. Then Obregón, to compensate for this lapse in logic, presents an even less tenable hypothesis: involution or degeneration. No, Bustos's excellence in portrait painting and his weakness in other painterly techniques derives from his not having had formal instruction. And now the third: not only did Bustos declare himself time and time again an amateur, that is, someone who did not study painting in an academy, but in 1903, in the golden altar of the parish church, he signs a painting: "Hermenegildo Bustos, amateur painter without master at the age of seventy-two." We must fall back on our original suppositions: Bustos's masters were a few books and icons. More important were his eyes that penetrated all he saw, his memory that retained his vision, and his skill and imagination that reproduced and transfigured that vision. Bustos never painted landscapes, interiors, or nudes. Perhaps his clumsiness in painting figures, backgrounds, and perspectives kept him from trying. As for nudes, it may be that the Puritanism of provincial Mexico prohibited it. There are two still lifes in which appear fruit, vegetables, a frog, and a scorpion. The artist avoided composition problems by arranging the fruit and vegetables in rows, which makes the pictures resemble illustrations for a treatise on horticulture. The portraits, on the other hand, are notable for their verisimilitude, their modeling, their color, and their strong, flowing, finely detailed drawing. These qualities do not clash, but complement each other. I must emphasize the excellence of his drawing: the lines are firm and clear, but light, and, in their way, reflexive. By this I mean that the hand that draws the lines serves the eye that looks and the mind that measures, compares, and constructs. For Bustos, drawing was more than composition: it was exploration. None of Bustos 's drawings I have seen is a finished work of art in itself: all are studies, notes for future portraits. Nevertheless, they have their own charm; they are the foreshadowing of a painting, the prefiguration of a face. I am thinking specifically about the preparatory drawing for the portrait of his wife. It is difficult to forget those eyes that gaze with some surprise at the world from beneath bushy brows and a forehead that is dreamed rather than drawn. The face of the girl is a flower ready to bloom: how could that immature and delightful oval turn into the severe features that belong to the matron in the portrait and into the resigned, rather stolid face of the 1901 photograph? Bustos 's drawings were exercises in visual memory. He also used them to gain familiarity with his model and to try out his hand. Later, on the metal sheet or the canvas, he would begin to paint directly, in monochrome or in very subdued shades. Then he would apply color with delicacy and care. His touch is firm, never violent: there is nothing extreme in his brushstrokes. Expressionism was alien to Bustos. Walter Pach wonders how Bustos could follow that procedure and still create compositions in which the painterly quality seems supported by the skeleton of the drawing. The answer may lie in the visual memory I mentioned. As he painted, Bustos would follow the mental outline of his drawings: his hand painted while his memory drew. In any case, whatever his method, Bustos's oils reveal an extraordinary hand at drawing. As when bones covered with flesh and skin become the foundation for features, Bustos's drawing provides a structure for color and shade - an invisible architecture. Bustos draws the most complex and mysterious subject - the human face -perfectly, but he simply cannot manage a body, a grove of trees, three books, a glass, or a lamp on a table. This explains the strict limitations he imposed on himself, the limits of his own skill. He eliminated backgrounds, painted no interiors or exteriors, and reduced his models to their essence: the face. We deduce their social rank by their clothes jewelry, and occasionally, by what they hold in their hands: a book, a flower, a letter bearing the model's name, a schoolboy's slate. Bustos generally paints them in three-quarter profile, from the waist up. Except for a woman's portrait that shows her bare shoulders - her light blouse allows us a glimpse of her breasts -Bustos depicts his models fully clothed. Their clothing covers and defines them. Nevertheless, all these portraits radiate or, better, exude a powerful carnality. The body has become energy, has ceased to be mere form and volume, and become gesture, temperature, a fixed gaze. If I had to define my impression of these portraits in a single word, I would say without hesitation intensity. The drawing, the shading, the volume all come together in a concentrated energy. Behind the impassivity of these bronzed faces we sense seething passions and subterranean desires, an immense vitality held in check yet obstinately alive. The few critics who have tried to deal with this small, perfect, and personal oeuvre have, naturally enough, sought antecedents and parallels in tradition. Bustos makes us think about the origins of portrait painting, the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century. This is because of his realism, his indifference to social rank, conventions, notions of ideal beauty, and his visual economy - his "essentialism." This is different from the characteristic or the strange, from classical idealism, baroque or expressionist excess. Bustos does not seek an ideal in his portraits, as do the great Renaissance painters, nor a singularity or exceptional quality, as do baroque or modern portrait painters. He paints real people and thus evokes the Flemings. But as soon as we see the similarity it fades: comparison with Jan van Eyck is folly. The comparison reduces Bustos to nothing. Van Eyck is a beginning or, more precisely, the beginning of the great portrait art of the Western world. Bustos is a moment, an instant, in that tradition. But the comparison, although exaggerated, is useful. In Bustos we do not find the mysterious Flemish interiors, with their mixture of daily life and symbolic objects: windows like gulfs of clarity, the conjunctions of light and shadow on cloth and metal. But he shares their passion for human truth and their honesty. Painting a face is less an act of consecration than a recognition, a fraternal act. We owe to Walter Pach a less risky comparison. He connects Bustos's paintings with the anonymous portraits at Al Fayyum in Egypt. Those ancient paintings are surprisingly like Bustos's portraits, although, as we shall see, the similarities cannot mask the more profound differences. But the similarities are striking: the small dimensions, the absence of backgrounds, the face in three-quarter profile (the Al Fayyum artists also painted frontal portraits), the human figure reduced to the face and upper body, the care with emblematic details (the diadem of golden leaves in the portrait of a priest of Serapis and the breviary and cross in the portrait of a priest from La Purísima, the tablet and stylus in the hands of a Greek schoolmistress and the chalk and slate in the hands of a Mexican schoolboy). Realism. Neither the artists of Al Fayyum nor Bustos sought to represent types. They wanted concrete individuals, verisimilitude not idealization. These similarities are not misleading: they are simply superficial. 
There are major differences between the portraits painted on the sarcophagi that held the mummies of the elite of Al Fayyum and the portraits of the people of La Purísima. The differences relate to the social function of the portraits as well as to their formal elements. The Al Fayyum portraits are doubly anonymous: we don't know who the artists are and only rarely do we know the names of the models. The earliest examples date from a century or so after the fall of Ptolemaic Egypt under Roman domination in 30 B.C. and the most recent date from the fourth century A.D. The continuity of this tradition over more than three centuries with so few stylistic variations is notable. Without denying the charm, the psychological truth, or the religious pathos of many of these portraits, we are undoubtedly dealing with a collective style that precludes change and individual expression. For more than three hundred years hundreds of painters repeated a formula. The Al Fayyum portraits belong more to the history of religion than to the history of art. Since their discovery at the end of the last century, more than six hundred examples have been recovered, which may seem like a lot, but is nothing compared to what has been lost or is still buried. The models belonged to the upper classes of the province. Al Fayyum was a rich province in a rich nation, Egypt, and its managerial class was made up of cosmopolitan people - Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians - in constant contact with Alexandria, Athens, Rome, and other centers of the empire. Just one look at Bustos's world and the circumstances in which he lived is enough to show the differences between him and the painters of Al Fayyum. The dominant notes of that ancient art are continuity, impersonality, and uniformity. Bustos's art is profoundly individual: he was self-taught and his traditionalism is not an inheritance but a conquest, almost an invention. Other differences are no less significant. Bustos's models did not come from Mexico's elite, not even from the elite of his province; they were modest people from his small town. Nor were they anonymous: we know their names, when they were born, when they married, what their professions were, how many children they had. Bustos's oeuvre is not large and it occupies only half a century of the obscure life of a corner (rincon means "corner, " after all) of provincial Mexico, itself a provincial nation. And finally, each of Bustos's portraits was a distinct experience. Each one was an aesthetic and human adventure, a confrontation, an encounter. The Al Fayyum portraits are the final expression of the ancient funerary cults of pharaonic Egypt. Those cults, associated with Isis and Osiris, survived until the Roman occupation - proof of Egyptian  traditionalism and the almost indestructible nature of religious beliefs. From the beginning the mummies of important people were kept in sarcophagi that archeologists term "anthropomorphous," but which Klaus Parlasca thinks should be called "osiriform, " since they are related to the cult of Osiris, the god of the dead, of vegetation, and of resurrection. The custom survived under the Ptolemies and during the Roman period. The sarcophagi were deposited in a special hall dedicated to the ancestors where ritual days were celebrated with libations and funerary banquets. After two or three generations, the mummies were sent to cemeteries. In Al Fayyum, the sarcophagi were stored upright for reasons of space, often in special armoires. Originally, only the name of the deceased was inscribed on the upper part of the sarcophagus, but under the Romans, the custom of attaching a wooden tablet with the portrait of the dead person painted in enamel was begun. Two traditions merge in the Al Fayyum sarcophagi: the cult of Os iris (in his Hellenistic identity, Serapis), with its promise of resurrection, and the Roman portrait, which reproduces the physical traits of a person in order to perpetuate his personality. Roman realism at the service of Egyptian eschatology. It seems to me, nevertheless, that in the Al Fayyum portraits there is another element: the vivacity, the love of the characteristic and the singular that typify Alexandrian art. Despite the uniform painting technique, these portraits display a variety of faces, temperaments, and characters. From their names we see that many of the dead were Greeks or at least culturally Greek. Hellenism did not disappear from Egypt until the Arab invasion. Thus the hall of mummies at Al Fayyum actually held an assembly of candidates for immortality, which would be conferred through the combined action of Serapis and the portrait painters.

This immortality was limited to the well-off, who could pay the inflated prices demanded by the embalmers and the artists. The Al Fayyum portraits are part of a religious ritual whose keystone is belief in resurrection. But these portraits are not sacred images or relics: they are a passport to the other world, identification papers for a supernatural voyage. Despite his association with the Church and his genuine faith, Hermenegildo Bustos is essentially a secular artist. His portraits have nothing to do with funerary rites and don't even allude to a belief in the beyond. Nor are they concerned with death or eternity. Parlasca finds a curious analogy between the art of Al Fayyum and a custom practiced by aristocrats in seventeenth-century Poland: they would commission portraits (from artists who specialized in painting the dead), which they would then place on the coffin. We find the same custom in Mexico during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike his contemporaries, Bustos painted only one deceased model - the portrait of a dead little girl of 1884. The clients of the artists of Al Fayyum could carry on a silent dialogue with their dead on seeing the portrait; Bustos's clients could have a dialogue only with themselves. The realism of the Al Fayyum artists was an impersonal formula imposed by the Greco-Roman culture of their clients. In the case of Bustos, the artist's taste coincided with the taste of his clients: his art is born from the confluence of his personal vision and the collective vision. Like the art of Al Fayyum, the art of Mexico is the result of a conjunction of external influences and local realities. In Egypt, the art of a dominant group - Greeks and Romans - interpolates itself into the ancient religion. In Mexico, the religion and art of Europe quickened the moribund sensibility and imagination of a people the con quest had made into spiritual orphans. Of course, Bustos's attitude to artistic tradition was not one of simple submission. Not only did he proclaim himself an amateur without teachers but he proudly announced himself as an Indian. On the back of his self-portrait he wrote, "Hermenegildo Bustos, Indian from this town of La Purísima del Rincón. "At the bottom of the portrait of Father Martinez, he repeated, "I, Hermenegildo Bustos, amateur painter, Indian from this town...." There is no need to go on citing examples, but I must emphasize the meaning of these declarations: for Bustos, painting is an individual experience, a test. That's why he wrote on the back of his self-portrait "to see if I could. " In that test, he risked his entire being and something else: his racial identity. Bustos was affirming himself in the face of tradition, and that affirmation is double: the affirmation of a marginal artist with no academic education and that of an Indian. His traditionalism is extraordinarily modern and, seen in this way, polemical. Bustos's art is decidedly historical. It springs from the encounter between the artist and his model, is nourished by the confrontation between two othernesses, and resolves itself in a style that expresses not an eternal truth but an instantaneous perception: the mobility of a face, still for an instant. Calling that art "historic" perhaps creates confusion. All the arts are historic, since all human activities are; by this I mean that all are born in history and all, in one way or another, express history. All, also in one way or another, transcend history and at times negate it. Nevertheless, Bustos's art is historic in a more limited and particular sense. First, it does not refer to any reality, idea, or entity (eternal or supernatural). In his painting there are no myths, no ideas, no allegories. There are no visions of this world and the other world: no landscapes, no paradises, no infernos. Nor is there history in the usual sense of the word: heroes, traitors, tyrants, martyrs, masses, events. He did not paint historical events but the event of history. For Bustos, as for all of us, time passes, but not only in the chosen places, not only in historical scenarios, but in the outlands, in places without names. Each one of his paintings is dated and was painted in a determined place but those dates are private and that place is outside the great process of history. So, in what sense is his painting historic? It is born in time, it expresses time: it is pure time. The portrait is the fixed and momentous evidence of the meeting of two people - a dialogue, a struggle, a discovery - resolved in a recognition. The other becomes a corporeal presence. That presence speaks to us, gazes at us, hears us, and we hear it, we speak to it, and we gaze at it. That's how we discover that the presence is a person or, as we used to say, a soul. A unique being, similar to us, vulnerable and enigmatic. When we see a painting by Hermenegildo Bustos, we repeat that discovery. Time, the substance of history, appears for a moment: it is a human face.

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