Quis est ut Deus

As some of us will already be struggling to maintain our Lenten commitments, feeling we have the devil on our shoulders, I thought this painting from the Mexican artist Luis Juárez might offer some encouragement.

In the picture, the Archangel Saint Michael hovers over a fallen demon with a satyr’s ears. This is Satan, whom Michael, in the biblical Book of Revelation (or Apocalypse, 12:7–9), casts to earth, where he will tempt humans. Michael’s right hand is surrounded with a sun disk bearing his motto, “Quis est ut Deus”—“who is like God”—the translation into Latin of the Hebrew name “MijaEl.”

Luis Juárez is documented as working in Mexico City from 1609 to 1639, and presumably was born around 1585–1590. Works by Luis Juárez exhibit the influence of Spanish painters active in Mexico, such as Alonso Vázquez, with whom he may have trained. This image is also derived in part from two compositions by the Netherlandish artist Maerten de Vos (1532–1603) and engraved by Hieronymus Wierix (1548–1624), though neither prints were slavishly copied. The works of Juárez and his contemporaries set the stage for the arrival in Mexico in the 1630s of the 17th-century tenebrist style, with its sharper contrasts of light and dark and dynamic compositions.