Page 130 - The mystery of faith

The present sculpture therefore illustrates an important step in the artist’s development of this subject,
the culmination of which is his 1606 masterpiece in Seville. Here, the addition of inset rock crystal eyes
and the somewhat rigidly posed legs, which are modelled in limited detail, result in a work which, while
not strictly naturalistic (at least, not in the sense of the 1606 sculpture), is nevertheless of great beauty
and refinement. Moreover, as is fantastically rare in Montañés, this sculpture retains its original
polychromy, which aids us in dating the work to between 1600 and 1606, a period to which Álvaro
Recio dates another sculpture of the same subject in the collection of Marañón Morales.

The base of the sculpture takes the traditional form of a cushion, though it lacks tassels at the corners,
above a moulded plinth, carved and decorated in an early seventeenth-century late Mannerist style with
an egg-and-dart border separated by ‘flying’ volutes.

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

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