for his patron Archbishop José Manuel Rubio y Salinas, one for Pope Benedict XIV, and a third to use "as a model for further copies." The essential purpose of Maravilla Americana was to affirm the 1666 opinions of the witnesses who swore that the image of the Virgin was of a miraculous nature. However, he also elaborated a novel opinion: the image was crafted with a unique variety of techniques. He contended that the Virgin's face and hands were painted in oil paint, while her tunic, mandorla, and the cherub at her feet were all painted in egg tempera. Finally, her mantle was executed in gouache. He observed that the golden rays emanating from the Virgin seemed to be of dust that was woven into the very fabric of the canvas, which he asserted was of "a coarse weave of certain threads which we vulgarly call pita," a cloth woven from palm fibers. His involvement in the analysis of the Guadalupe image was part of his long term campaign to raise the status of painters from mere artisans to respected practitioners of the liberal arts. It came at the same time that Mexican archbishop Manuel José Rubio y Salinas (1749-1765) sought the designation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a universal patron. Jesuit Francisco López was the advocate in Rome for her cause. Benedict XIV recognized Guadalupe with her own feast day, starting in 1754. In 1753, he founded the second Academy of Painting in Mexico City and served as its director. Most of the rest of his works are also religious in nature; as the official painter of the Archbishop of Mexico, Cabrera painted his and other portraits. In 1760, Cabrera created The Virgin of the Apocalypse, which describes the chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation. He is also known for his posthumous portrait of the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Cabrera is currently most famous for his casta paintings. One of the sixteen in the set that was missing for many years was purchased by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015. The museum received information that the last of the sixteen, thought lost, may be in Los Angeles, California. In the 19th century, the writer José Bernardo Couto called him "the personification of the great artist and of the painter par excellence; and a century after his death the supremacy which