Page 174 - The mystery of faith

carrying the infant Christ in his arms. Although La
Roldana adopted the first approach in the version
made for the Carmelites, it was the second mode that
proved to be more popular and was more frequently
depicted. Moreover, Andalusian sculptors employed
two variations for the pose of the Child when held by
the saint: one, in which the Child nestles in his father’s
arms, and the figures express a relaxed sense of filial
affection; and another less naturalistic arrangement in
which the saint appears to present the Child standing
upon his arm.

Once Saint Joseph became accepted as a specific
subject in Andalusian art, sculptors began to depict
him walking with the Child to illustrate his formative
role in the Saviour’s early life, and the iconography of
the two figures walking as father and son was
particularly fashionable during the early seventeenth
century. Juan de Mesa made several statues, like the
one in Fuentes de Andalucia (1615–1616); or the lost
work made three years later for Diego de Herrera,
which survives in description as: ‘A Saint Joseph with
the child Jesus, clasping his [son’s] hand and holding a
saw’;7 or even the version carved around 1620 for the
Carmelite Descalzes Convent of the Guardian Angel,
which Mesa based upon another version of the subject
in the order’s sister Convent of Nuestra Señora de los
Remedios. Yet another Saint Joseph and the Child by
Mesa belonged to the Carmelite Descalzes Convent of
Saint Teresa of Jesús in Seville (c.1609–1610).

Francisco Ocampo also sculpted two versions of the
subject – a high relief for the altarpiece of the Chapel
of the Virgin of Mercy in the Church of San Pedro in
Carmona (1617), and a sculpture in the round for the
parish church of Villamartín, outside Cadiz (1622).
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries the most important representations of Saint
Joseph and the Child were those painted by Domeniko
Theotokopoulos, El Greco, for the Chapel of San Jose
in Toledo, and, in terms of sculpture, the model for the

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