Catholic tradition holds that in December 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared to an indigenous convert, Juan Diego, at Tepeyac near Mexico City, and that when he gathered roses at her instruction and carried them in his cloak to the bishop, Juan de Zumarraga, as proof, the roses fell away to reveal an image of the Virgin imprinted on the cloth itself. The cloak, called a tilma, was woven from maguey, or agave, fiber, a material conservators generally expect to degrade within a few decades under normal conditions. It is displayed today at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City, one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world, and venerated as the original, unrestored image.
The earliest surviving published telling of the story, a Nahuatl language text called the Nican Mopohua, appeared in 1649, within a larger work called the Huei tlamahuicoltica, printed by Luis Lasso de la Vega, more than a century after the events it describes. Devotional tradition attributes the Nican Mopohua's composition to the indigenous scholar Antonio Valeriano, writing decades earlier than its printing. The image itself combines elements later writers have read as drawn from the Book of Revelation, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, alongside visual conventions familiar to its earliest indigenous audience, a blending some take as evidence of deliberate cultural bridging, whatever view is taken of the image's origin.