Page 57 - The mystery of faith

Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Cruz Cabrera’s recent study aside, since the initial work by Orozco Díaz, contributions to our
understanding of the ‘Hermanos’ García have been few, so the four works exhibited here for the first
time present us with a rare opportunity for study and comparison. These recently discovered and
previously unpublished works are four reliefs that depict Saint Francis of Assisi in the Wilderness with
a Music-Making Angel (cat. no. 2); The Penitent Saint Jerome (cat. no. 5); and two versions of Saint
John the Baptist in the Wilderness (cat. nos. 3, 4). These important additions to the brothers’ known
corpus, specifically those rare examples that employ expressive figures modelled almost in the round or
in high relief and set against a flat pictorial background, offer us the chance to examine a rich variety
of comparisons with not only their well-known versions of Ecce Homo, but also their variety of
landscape motifs.

Three of the four sculptures are dated: the two depicting Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (cat.
nos. 3 and 4) are dated respectively to 1625 and 1628, and the Penitent Saint Jerome (cat. no. 5) is
dated 1628. If we compare this last work with another earlier version of the same subject in Puerto
Rico, which is dated to 1619 (Fig. 4),17 we can immediately see how in the earlier work the brothers
took a more Mannerist approach to composition, use of gesture, foreshortening and anatomy, all of
which are more subtle and naturalistic in the later version. There are four other versions of the Penitent
Saint Jerome: one in Granada (Fig. 5), and two in Madrid in private collections (Thyssen Collection;

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