Page 152 - The mystery of faith

buried. He was so shocked by the transformation death wrought upon her features that he swore an
oath then and there ‘never again to serve a mortal master’.6 This episode is generally held up as the
Francis’s first step towards joining the Society of Jesus, but some writers cite it as one of several such
events that formed the saint’s spiritual identity.7

Francis Borgia was canonized on 12 April 1671,8 almost fifty years after his Jesuit brother Francis
Xavier was elevated to sainthood. It is perhaps this relative delay that influenced the formation of
Francis Borgia’s more moderate iconography, which usually focused upon his reflections on death and
mortality, and generally portrayed him contemplating a crowned skull. There were however, other
episodes in this saint’s life, which are also referred to in his imagery, such as Francisco Goya’s painting
of the saint exorcizing a dying man.9

This sculpture of Saint Francis Borgia is pendant to the Saint Francis Xavier and also depicts the saint
standing and dressed in a cassock. The right hand is held aloft, to hold the aforementioned (possibly
crowned) skull, which is unfortunately now lost. The face reflects a distant expression that
communicates Francis’s musings on the fragility of human life and the vanity of power. Again, as is the
case with Saint Francis Xavier, this sculpture has not retained its original black and gold estofado
decoration, though traces are just visible between the folds of the vestments. These traces became even
more evident in the process of restoration, when the later violet floral motifs were removed. These
particular motifs were added during the nineteenth century to many earlier works and often appear to
obscure the original polychromy like so many unwanted weeds.

The style of both sculptures indicate that they were made at the height of the Baroque period, and are
aesthetically already far removed from the style and technique of Juan Martínez Montañes. The poses,
treatment of the facial features and the hair all reflect a greater naturalism, and, together with the
absence of any forced contrapposto or intense chiaroscuro, point towards a date around the mid
seventeenth century. This is precisely the time when Roldán had begun working in Seville. Roldán went
on to establish the city’s most prestigious workshop, snaring the majority of his sculptural commissions
during the second half of the seventeenth century.

The attribution of these two works to Roldán should now be discussed in terms of stylistic and
iconographic comparisons with the sculptor’s other known commissions. With regard to works
commissioned specifically by the Society of Jesus, we have, as yet, no documents that connect any of
these contracted works with Roldán. Nevertheless, we can be certain that there was some professional
contact between the Society and the artist, since one of Roldán’s contemporaries places some of his
works in the Jesuit school of the Immaculate Conception, nicknamed in the Sevillian dialect ‘Las Becas’.

In his paper on Roldán, researcher Jorge Bernales considered the artist’s intervention in Las Becas
‘debatable’,10 since the destruction of the temple during the nineteenth century11 resulted in very little
available data surviving that related to the site’s artistic history. Bernales wrote that Roldán was said to
have contributed to the works on two levels: architectural (the church’s floor plan was attributed to

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