Page 54 - The mystery of faith

The Garcías were canons of the Colegiata del Salvador in Granada4 and, as artists, were active in the
city from the second half of the sixteenth century until the 1630s. Within their own lifetime they were
lauded by contemporary writers such as Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza,5 Collado del Hierro, and the
Gongorian poet Pedro Soto de Rojas, who made reference to them in his cryptic poem, Jardines abiertos
para pocos...6 Despite these accolades, their names do not figure in Spanish art-history texts until the
beginning of the eighteenth century, when the painter and art theorist Antonio Palomino de Castro y
Velasco added them to his El Parnaso Español Pintoresco Laureado (1724), the first biographical
corpus of Spanish artists.7 It was Palomino who first compiled the basic facts of the brothers’ lives and
work, indicating that one brother modelled the sculptures and the other painted them. In his brief
introduction to their work, Palomino also took the opportunity to point out the importance of
polychromy in sculpture and his belief that with the loss of painterly refinement, Spanish sculpture
suffered markedly. It is also thanks to Palomino that we know that the Garcías were born in Granada,
that they were named Jerónimo Francisco and Miguel Jerónimo, and that they were twins, although
whether identical or fraternal is not mentioned.

Palomino also noted that an epigram (or impresa) written by the Granadine poet Pedro de Araujo
Salgado and preserved along with other documents by the Cordoban painter Juan de Alfaro (fl.
1643–1680)8 is further evidence of these family ties. This epigram established the tradition of a
linguistic play on the words pairing the name García with ‘gracia’, the Spanish word for grace, which
was seen as the identifying character of the brothers’ works, that is the Garcías ‘graced’ everything they
touched. To this day, there remains a paucity of personal information about the brothers, but now,
thanks to the recent discovery of a series of unpublished sculptures included in this exhibition
representing The Penitent Saint Jerome (cat. no. 5) and Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (cat.
no. 4), both of which are dated 1628, we can assume that at least one brother, the sculptor presumably,
or both brothers were alive throughout the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

The majority of the brothers’ known sculptures are in polychromed terracotta and several of the most
important works depict the subject of Ecce Homo in a variety of sizes, poses and sculptural formats.
Also attributed to the brothers are two wooden polychrome sculptures: a life-sized Crucifix in Granada
Cathedral, and a (contested) Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness in the Cathedral Museum (to be
discussed in greater detail below).9 According to Bermúdez de Pedraza, their wax sculptures were also
highly praised during their lifetime.10 However, we do not know of any surviving work en cera that can
be securely attributed to them, save for the waxen rocks included in the Saint John the Baptist in the
Wilderness (1628; cat. no. 4) exhibited here.

???

THE SCULPTURES: ‘ALGO MAS QUE LOS ECCE HOMO’

I n his initial assessment of the ‘Hermanos’ García, Orozco Díaz focused primarily on their many
versions of Ecce Homo, and separated them into three groups. The first group comprises nearly life-
size half-length figures with bound hands and wearing thick crowns of thorns. Examples of this type

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