Page 158 - The mystery of faith

gold estofado and looking intently at the crucifix held in the left hand, while in his right he holds the
book of the Constitutions of the Society. This work has been attributed to Roldán on the basis of the
formal and stylistic characteristics it shares with other known sculptures by Roldán, including the
present works. Moreover, given the work’s Jesuit subject the Saint Ignatius Loyola could well have
formed part of the sculptures located at Las Becas. Magnificently well preserved and with its original
polychromy, this work shares the same technical refinement as the Saint Francis Xavier, as well as the
beautifully articulated draperies and estofado decoration of the Saint Francis Borgia.

Again, there is to date no documentary evidence directly connecting Roldán to the Society of Jesus.
However, the congregation of Nuestra Señora de la Alegría entrusted Roldán (along with the
ensamblador Bernardo Simón de Pineda) to produce an altarpiece for a chapel in their Church of San
Bartolomé in Seville. In essence the artists were entrusted: ‘To deliver perfectly finished sculptures of
Saint Ferdinand III and Saint Ignatius Loyola, both to measure each a height of around siete quartas’.28
This sculpture of Saint Ignatius Loyola (Fig. 5), along with the other version in the museum in
Valladolid (Fig. 4), provides us with an important parallel to our Saint Francis Borgia. All three
sculptures exhibit the same approach to figure type, arrangement of vestments, and execution of
polychromy and estofado decoration, particularly the latter two sculptures where traces of the original
decoration are still clearly visible amongst the drapery folds. A valid comparison may also be made to
another version of the subject in the Church of Saint Domingo on Tenerife, which also shows the same
pose, and which is clearly Sevillian in origin (Fig. 6). Because this work retains some of its original
polychromy, it could give us some idea of how the original polychromy of the present Saint Francis
Xavier may have appeared.29

In conclusion, these sculptures of Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Francis Borgia were made in Seville by
Pedro Roldán around the mid seventeenth century. Based on their subject and technique they were
possibly part of the sculptural decoration of the chapel of the Jesuit College of Las Becas, which was
destroyed in the early nineteenth century.

1 I. ARELLANO, Misión y aventura: San Francisco Javier, Sol 4 Regarding the costume iconography of Saint Francis
en Oriente, Madrid 2008, p. 147. Xavier in Navarran images, see a published example
conserved in Elgorriaga (M. J. TARIFA CASTILLA, ‘San
2 Also canonized on this same date were Saint Ignatius Francisco Javier y San Fermín, en un cuadro de la iglesia
Loyola, Saint Teresa of Jesus, Saint Isidore the Labourer and parroquial de San Pedro de Elgorriaga’, at http://www.
Saint Phillip Neri. See M. PONCE, ‘Relación de las fiestas a la unav.es/catedrapatrimonio/paginasinternas/pieza/sanfrancis
canonización de cinco santos (1622)’, in Revue hispanique, cojavierysanfermin/default.html, Navarre, July 2008,
no. 110, New York 1919, pp. 583–606. [accessed on 6 June 2009]).

3 More rarely, a large crab is included scuttling at Francis’s 5 Further in this study, we will see how a sculpture with
feet, a reference to one of the saint’s miracles. In 1546, similar iconography, conserved in the Church of Santo
travelling to Malacca, Francis was caught in a storm. Domingo de Santa Cruz de la Palma (Tenerife), can give us
Praying for deliverance, he threw his crucifix into the sea in an approximate idea of how this type of estofado decoration
the hopes of calming the waves. The storm stopped and would have originally appeared on the present work.
when Francis reached the shores of Malacca, he saw a crab
crawling towards him bearing his missing crucifix in its 6 P. DE RIBADENEYRA, Vida del padre Francisco de Borja,
claw. Madrid 1592, pp. 16–17.

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