Close
Diego Rivera. South wall of the mural cycle History of the State of Morelos: Conquest and Revolution, with image of Emiliano Zapata. 1930. Fresco, approx. 19' 10 3/16" x 15' 9 3/4" (6.05 x 4.82 m). Palacio de Cortés, Museo Regional Cuauhnáhuac, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Cuernavaca, Mexico. © 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © 2011 Eumelia Hernández, Ricardo Alvarado; Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes
Agrarian Leader Zapata is based on a panel from Rivera’s mural cycle at the Palacio de Cortés in Cuernavaca, the capital of the Mexican state of Morelos. A native of that same state, Zapata led campaigns for land reform, including an effort to reorganize the area’s sugar industry into a system of cooperatives. In Rivera’s image, the rebel wields the type of machete used to harvest sugar cane, a clear reference to Zapata’s revolutionary agenda and Morelos’s most important agricultural product.
Emiliano Zapata at his headquarters in Cuernavaca. c. 1913. Photograph by Hugo Brehme. Casasola Archive, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Mexico. © (186458) CONACULTA. INAH-SINAFO-FN-Mexico
Dressed as a humble peasant in huaraches and a white cotton shirt and trousers, Rivera’s portrait of Zapata departs from portrayals propagated by popular press images and by the rebel himself. An expert horseman, Zapata consistently presented himself as a charro, a cowboy whose flamboyant dress—tight pants and a vest with silver ornamentation—signaled an elevated class status in Mexico. Rivera’s vision of Zapata as a humble peasant offers a sympathetic portrait of a folk hero tirelessly devoted to Mexico’s disenfranchised agrarian workers.
Paolo Uccello (Italian, c. 1397–1475). The Battle of San Romano (detail). c. 1438. Tempera on wood. Full panel: 71 3/4" x 10' 5 1/2" (1.82 x 3.22 m). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Photograph by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
Emiliano Zapata on horseback. c. 1915. Photographer unknown. Casasola Archive, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Mexico. © (186444) CONACULTA. INAH-SINAFO-FN-Mexico
Rivera ennobles Mexican history—and Zapata—in this work by linking them to the grandeur of European artistic tradition. The steed, whose owner Zapata has just dragged from his saddle, shares the color and imposing presence of horses in Paolo Uccello’s early 15th-century painting The Battle of San Romano, which Rivera studied on a 1920–21 trip to Italy. Visual parities between Zapata and the horse in terms of scale and color have led commentators to assume the animal belongs to the revolutionary, whose actual horse was black.
Diego Rivera. Illustration of Emiliano Zapata on horseback, as reproduced in Manuel Velázquez Andrade, Fermín. Libro mexicano de lectura para primer año (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1927). © 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy Editorial RM
Rivera continually reinvented the image of Zapata for didactic purposes. He often drew upon photographs and images of the revolutionary that were distributed widely by press outlets, modernizing his mural practice by integrating these new media forms. Aimed at a broad audience of diverse ages, social and economic classes, and nationalities, Rivera’s portraits of the revolutionary leader appeared in a variety of media, ranging from his monumental mural cycles to prints and book illustrations.