Figure 1. Tonalá búcaro, c.1675 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Sansbury-Mills Fund, 2015; public domain).
The búcaros or vases of Estremoz (Portugal), Nata (Panama), Chile and Tonalá (Guadalajara, Mexico) were earthenware made of clays with extraordinary powers. Búcaros allowed water inside to evaporate easily while creating a wonderful aroma in the atmosphere. The remaining water in the jug would become refreshingly cold, partaking of the aroma of the special clays. Búcaros were perfumed humidifiers and systems of water refrigeration. In early modern Portugal, grandees and fashionable urbanites would eat clay (allegedly from Armenia but actually from Estremoz) as pastries wrapped with the seal Sultan. Sultan pastries were morsels that resembled rosary beads. The pastry was made of clay mixed with flour, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, bergamot oil (extract from the rind of oranges), vanilla, amber and musk. This was the early modern contraceptive pill for the rich and pale. Physicians encouraged patients to eat clay. When ingested baked, it was capable of lowering blood iron levels, causing paleness and stopping menstruation. Brothels had prostitutes ingest Tonalá and Estremoz clay for birth control. The Tonalá búcaros of Guadalajara were even better than those of Estremoz for avoiding pregnancy. It is very likely that the production of búcaros was first introduced by Franciscan friars who arrived in the town of Tonalá in the wake of Nuño de Guzmán’s conquest of Nueva Galicia in 1530. Tonalá was the political indigenous centre of the region and the first capital of Nuño de Guzmán’s new kingdom. It was also a pre-Hispanic centre of pottery production.
Figure 2. The curato of Tonalá and subordinate towns, 1772, produced by the alcalde or mayor Agapito Martínez. The map became part of general report on curatos or parishes of the dioceses of Nueva Galicia submitted to the Council of the Indies by the president of the Audiencia of Guadalajara, Eusebio Sánchez (Archivo General de Indias, Mapas-Mexico, 285; public domain).
In Diego Velázquez’s famous palace portrait of the royal family of King Philip IV, today known as Las Meninas, the menina María Agustina Sarmiento offers the infanta Margarita a Tonalá búcaro (Figure 3). Paleness and amenorrhea were ideal images of female purity in the baroque. The infanta was still a girl. Should we assume the menina wanted the royal heir to drink aromatic water or to avoid future menstrual discharge, or perhaps both?
Figure 3. Diego Velázquez, detail of Las Meninas (Prado Museum; public domain).
The reasons why the duchess of Béjar, on the other hand, grabbed a búcaro of Estremoz from her dwarf-page – as the 1585 painting by Sánchez Coello suggests – are less clear (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Alonso Sánchez Coello, Doña Juana de Mendoza, duquesa de Béjar, con un enano, (Madrid, 1585; Marqués de Griñon Collection; public domain).
The trade of clays from Estremoz and Tonalá surfaces in the literature of the golden age. In El acero de Madrid, a comedia published in Madrid in 1611 (and one assumes staged in theatres prior to its publication), Lope de Vega recounts a series of wooing couples, particularly Belisa and Lisardo. Belisa is beautifully pale and anaemic (opilada) because she likes to chew Portuguese clay.
In 1634, Lope de Vega has Dorothea as another aspiring pale female who is wooed by the poet Fernando and the much older Bela. The Mexican Bela is no match for the dreamy Fernando, Dorothea’s true love. But Bela has money, and búcaros. Bela eventually dies of his wounds from a fight with Fernando, but he leaves Dorothea the expensive búcaros as a token of his affection (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Lope Felix de Vega Carpio, La Dorothea (Madrid, 1634; public domain).
Tonalá, Nata, Chilean and Estremoz búcaros signified early modern wealth in Spain and Portugal and among Iberian elites resident in Italy and Flanders (although one of the largest extant collections of the pots resides today in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum). Búcaros surfaced repeatedly in early modern still-life paintings as representations of grandee splendour and the aristocratic life of collecting. They also surface in probate records of aristocratic collectors. In eight late 17th-century letters addressed to several members of the Italian nobility, Count Lorenzo Magalotti articulated criteria for collectors. He offered observational and sensory techniques on how to identify the regional varieties of búcaros and how to distinguish American from Portuguese ones (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Lorenzo Magalotti, Delle lettere familiari, 2 vols. (Florence, 1769; public domain).
Figure 7. Giuseppe Recco, Bodegón con sirviente, 1679. The painting depicts a Seville collection of New World búcaros along with an African house slave (Fundación Casa Ducal Medinaceli; public domain).
Although many Mediterranean nobles collected búcaros of Estremoz avidly, the countess of Ocaña was one of the most important early modern collectors of búcaros of Tonalá, as the records of her estate show. Her collection reached into the thousands of items. Her descendant Josefa de la Cerda y Palafox, widow of the count of Ocaña, left the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid a collection of only 100 búcaros of Tonalá in 1885. In 1941, the museum ceded the Tonalá búcaro collection to the Museum of the Americas, where they can still be found.
In short, the early modern pill of the nobility was made of clay from Portugal and Mexico. The guardians of their supplies were, in many cases, countesses. Today these early modern pills are stored in exotic ethnography museums.
Hamann, B.E. (2010) ‘The mirrors of Las Meninas: cochineal, silver, and clay’, Art Bulletin, 92 (1–2): 6–35.
Seseña, N. (1991) ‘El búcaro de Las Meninas’, in Velázquez y el arte de su tiempo: V Jornadas de Arte (Madrid: Editorial Alpuerto), 38–49.
Urutia, S., and J. de la Fuente (eds.) (1991) Tonalá: sol de barro (Mexico: Banco Cremi).
de Vasconcellos Carolina, M. (1905) ‘Algumas palavras a respeito de púcaros de Portugal’, Bulletin Hispanique, 7 (2): 140–96.