The Last Communion of Saint Bonaventure

This piece, attributed to José Juárez, shows the moment preceding the death of Saint Bonaventure, an illustrious Franciscan theologian, named Seraphic Doctor of the Church by Pope Sixtus V in 1587, and patron of the French city of Lyon. The event occurred in 1274, during the celebration in Lyon of a council that sought to unify the Latin and Greek churches. Bonaventure was overtaken by exhaustion and fell seriously ill. His condition was so critical that it prevented him from receiving viaticum, which is when the miracle occurred. Before the astonished eyes of those who were accompanying the saint in his last moments -including James I of Aragón, situated in the right foreground of the composition- the blessed host flew through the air and settled on the chest of the cleric, who, now surmounted by a bright halo indicating his impending sainthood, communed through his heart. On the back right-hand side of the work is a window through which we can see a scene from the saint's life, a mechanism used in numerous works by Juárez so as to bring together, in a single picture, incidents that occurred at other times or in other places. Here depicted is the moment when the humble Saint Bonaventure, who refused to commune because he deemed himself unworthy, received a communion wafer from the hands of an angel sent by God. This work may have been one of a series of three canvases recounting the life of Saint Bonaventure that decorated the main staircase of the Franciscan Convent in México City. It entered the MUNAL as part of its founding endowment in 1982.