Page 143 - The mystery of faith

became increasingly dynamic. Although tradition has it that they owed this style to Alonso Cano, in
reality it was influenced by José de Arce, whose style imported the refined emotionalism of the Flemish
sculptor François Duquesnoy.2

The present sculptures were first exhibited in 1983, where they were published as ‘Circle of Ribas’.3 In
her entry for the works included in the exhibition catalogue, Ana Marín Fidalgo compares the present
Infant Christ to another work of the same subject donated in 1644 by Francisco Dionisio de Ribas to
the Confraternity of La Amargura in San Juan de la Palma. Marín Fidalgo cited similarities between all
three works, and cited similarities between all three works and made the stylistic connection with the
work of José de Arce. Our Infant Christ, also shares remarkable similarities with another unpublished
version that once belonged to the parish church of the Immaculate Conception in the Almargen region
of Malaga.4 Two years after the Seville exhibition, María Teresa Dabrio González published an
exhaustive study of the Ribas family: Felipe, sculptor and altarpiece designer; Francisco Dionisio,
altarpiece designer; and Gaspar, painter, giving particular attention to their work in relation to that of
their contemporaries in Seville. In the section devoted to questionable attributions, she mentions the
present sculptures, but excludes them from the corpus of autograph works by the Ribas family,
cataloguing them, with certain reservations, as simply the product of a Granadine workshop. However,
owing to their size, technique and stylistic attributes, we in turn can exclude this hypothesis and

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