Page 53 - The mystery of faith

LOS HERMANOS GARCÍA

SCULPTORS, PAINTERS AND BROTHERS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GRANADA

AN EXAMINATION OF THEIR WORK
AND THE SHIFT TOWARDS NATURALISM IN ANDALUSIAN BAROQUE SCULPTURE

‘While we do not hope to reconstruct an entire chronology of the García brothers’ oeuvre from a single
work, we do believe that with this examination we can take a big step towards developing a clearer
understanding of their career. Equally, we are optimistic that the possible future discovery of hitherto
unknown works in convent collections, such as one of their very popular wax sculptures, for example,
will settle any remaining shadow of a doubt surrounding our attributions.’1

I n 1939 Professor Emilio Orozco Díaz organized an exhibition of clay sculptures in Granada to
honour the feast of Corpus Christi. Two years later, his introduction to the exhibition catalogue was
published in Cuadernos de Arte, the magazine of the Philosophy department of the University of
Granada, where, in over sixteen pages illustrated with thirty-five photographs and figures, he
analysed the development of polychromed terracotta sculpture, beginning in the sixteenth century with the
work of the brothers Miguel and Jerónimo García and continuing through to the end of the nineteenth
century. Orozco Díaz also included a summary of artistic antecedents in Seville starting from the fifteenth
century onwards. This article formed the bedrock for all studies of these twin brothers, who are
traditionally known to have worked in tandem; one modelling in clay, the other executing the polychromy.

Orozco Díaz noted that there are no known definite dates for the brothers’ career or specific works:
‘We do not know any of their works with certainty, however those clay [sculptures] and polychrome
works that are preserved in Granada share such close affinities that they call the traditional attributions
[to a variety of artists] into doubt’.2 Orozco Díaz initially reconstructed the brothers’ corpus by relating
three concomitant facts: a) that a series of clay and wax sculptures were produced in late sixteenth and
early seventeenth-century Granada; b) that the brothers were known to have worked in these materials;
and c) that, throughout, these sculptures exhibit a sense of naturalism that corresponds to the
transitional phase between Mannerism and the Baroque in Spanish sculpture, which is precisely when
the brothers are known to have worked. Ruling out the possibility that the brothers were provincial
artisans, Orozco Díaz instead posited the theory that they were members of Granada’s cultural and
literary circle.

In a previous study on the Garcías, Orozco Díaz had noted their contribution to a new iconography of
the Passion, as illustrated by a small (20-centimetre) statuette in clay in the Convent of San Isabel La
Real, Granada, similar to an Ecce Homo from the Convent of San Antón, although with the hands
unbound and the facial expression looking imploringly upwards. Several decades later, Professor
Hernández Díaz attributed another small Ecce Homo in the Cathedral Museum in Cadiz to the Garcías,
and in fact, because of its unusually small size relative to the subject matter, believed it to be one of
their studio models, or bocetos.3

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