Page 25 - The mystery of faith

Tú me mueves, Señor, muéveme el verte
clavado en una cruz y escarnecido
muéveme el ver tu cuerpo tan herido,
muéveme tus afrentas y tu muerte.
[You move me, Lord, it moves me to see you
nailed to a cross and ridiculed
it moves me to see your badly hurt body,
your humiliation and your death move me.]12

???

J uan de Mesa joined Montañés’ workshop when he was twenty-
three years old, and many of the works attributable to him reflect
the examples of the master, including sculptures of Christ Crucified
and the Infant Christ. Mesa’s processional images continue to play
important roles in the pageantry of Holy Week in Seville, along with
others created in the twentieth century: the tradition continues today.

Alonso Cano (1601–1667), born in Granada, studied the art of
painting with Francisco Pacheco in Seville, and worked in Seville,
Madrid and Granada. However, unlike that other famous student of
Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Cano did not limit his artistic efforts to
painting, but also created polychromed sculptures, such as the Virgin
of the Immaculate Conception in the cathedral sacristy, Granada
(Fig. 10); a marble Guardian Angel for the Franciscans in Granada;
stone reliefs (piedra ripia que se trajo de la Sierra de Calva) for the Fig. 10
exterior of Granada Cathedral;13 and his last work was as an architect: the design for the facade of the
cathedral. Cano’s sculptured figures have always been admired for their serene naturalism. A
nineteenth-century American visitor to Spain anticipates our own response to Cano’s Virgin of the
Immaculate Conception:

One work of Cano, a sculptured Virgin in Wood, excited all our admiration; it is carved in the most
delicate manner, and coloured with all the pains and power of miniature. It is curious how a little wooden
doll can be so stirring. The expression of the rich, lustrous eye, of the sweetest pensive purity, and the
whole countenance, one to dream about; the drapery seemed to hang and wave, and the attitude is divine
in its truth and nature. The padre told me a French nobleman had offered them more than one hundred
and twenty thousand rials for it ($12,000). Many other works of art he pointed out and explained [...]
but nothing could take my whole sense like that sweet, meditative eyelid of Nuestra Señora. I have seen
a thousand faces far less natural.14

Cano exercised a strong influence on sculpture in late seventeenth-century Granada. Pedro de Mena
(1628–1688) first studied with his father Alonso de Mena, then collaborated with Cano, carving
sculptures based on models by the master. Mena moved to Malaga in 1658 and stayed there the rest of
his life. His principal legacy is a series of statues that became iconic in their formulation and were
frequently copied, such as the Virgin of Sorrows (Mater Dolorosa), the Ecce Homo, or the Penitent

25