Page 27 - The mystery of faith

T he art of polychromed sculpture continued throughout the Fig. 13
eighteenth century. Francisco Salzillo (1707–1783) in Murcia
and the followers of Pedro Roldán (1624–1699) in Seville
continued the traditions of religious images established by the great
masters of the seventeenth century. Roldán had established himself
as the most important sculptor in Seville after Martínez Montañés,
with his greatest achievements being multi-figural works, such as
the Descent from the Cross in the Hospital of Charity of Seville,
that combine carved figures with relief carvings with background
paintings. His daughter, Luisa Roldán (c. 1656–c. 1704), the first
female sculptor recorded in Spain, married a sculptor and became
the family’s primary breadwinner. She created works in wood of
great power, such as the figure of San Ginés de la Jara (Los
Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum; Fig. 12), and late in her career
garnered a place at the court where she created many small
polychrome terracotta groups, such as Madonna and Child with
Saint John the Baptist (Chicago, Loyola University Art Museum;
Fig. 13). Salzillo and his family workshop in Murcia were
enormously productive and created multi-figural narrative scenes
representing, among other subjects, the Last Supper, the Agony in
the Garden and a famous Nativity. The latter, begun by Salzillo and
continued by his follower Roque López, comprises 556 small
terracotta figures (Murcia, Museo Salzillo).

With these small works by Luisa Roldán and Salzillo, polychrome sculpture in Spain moved towards
less retrained expressions of pathos or joy, a smaller scale, and charming images of the Holy Family,
chubby angels, and genre figures attending the birth of Christ. It is not useful to apply the terms
Baroque or Rococo to Spanish polychrome sculpture, for its practitioners were neither classicizing
Algardis nor full-blooded High Baroque artists like Bernini. Spanish sculpture through the centuries
continued to be characterized by the ‘measured dignity’ with which Proske describes the late Gothic
style.

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W hen the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779) was called to work at the court in
Madrid, he made no bones about his dislike of Spain’s ‘monstrous magnificence of altars of
gilded wood, which cancelled every idea of beauty’ and ‘brought upon itself another still worse custom,
of making statues in wood, painted and gilded, with which they disgraced sculpture’.17 Mengs
influenced the critical stance of e Neoclassicists like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose admiration
of Greek sculpture effectively precluded the admissibility of colour in sculpture. Winckelmann wrote:
‘Colour should have but little share in our consideration of beauty. [...] As white is the colour which

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