The Fall of Juan Escutia
Gabriel Flores (1930 to 1993) · 1967
Look up. Painted across the vault above the stairs is a young cadet falling head first through space, wrapped in the green, white and red of the Mexican flag, while American soldiers in blue swarm below and the castle burns. He is Juan Escutia, one of the six Niños Héroes, the boy cadets of the Military College who died defending Chapultepec on the thirteenth of September 1847. According to the legend every Mexican child learns, Escutia wrapped himself in the flag and leapt from the ramparts rather than let it be captured.
Gabriel Flores painted the ceiling in 1967 in a style that owes as much to expressionist film as to the classic murals downstairs. The figure is seen from below in violent foreshortening, so that the boy seems to plunge directly towards you, his mouth open and his arms flung wide. The flag, with its eagle and serpent, becomes both shroud and wings. The invading soldiers are painted as a faceless, mechanical mass, their bayonets forming a jagged edge to the composition. The colours are stark: flame red, gunmetal blue, and the pale flesh of the falling figure.
The painting is placed exactly where the story happened. You are standing in the building that was the Military College, and the terrace outside is where the cadets fought. Historians debate the details of the leap, but the six boys are honoured in the marble Altar a la Patria at the foot of the hill, and their names are read out every year on the anniversary. This ceiling is the museum's most emotional image, and one that many Mexican visitors stop to photograph on their way up to the Alcázar.
Did You Know? Six boy cadets between thirteen and nineteen years old are commemorated as the Niños Héroes, and the story of the flag leap became part of the national curriculum only in the twentieth century.
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