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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Sculptures / 17th C. Spanish Colonial American Crucifix Pendant
North America, Spanish Colonial Florida. A cast crucifix pendant, silvered brass, its slender arms flaring to trilobed terminals and its upper limb pierced for suspension from a rosary or a cord worn at the throat. The corpus is modeled in bold, economical relief: head canted toward the right shoulder, arms outstretched along the transom, ribcage and loincloth indicated with a few decisive ridges, legs joined and feet crossed. Wear has burnished the raised surfaces to a pale silver-gray while the recesses hold darker tone, the ordinary signature of long devotional handling. Objects of this kind were produced in quantity for the missions and garrison towns of colonial Florida, distributed to converts and settlers alike, and carried as personal safeguards as much as as emblems of faith. The Spanish mission chain of La Florida, anchored at St. Augustine from 1565 and extending north into Guale and west across Apalachee, ran on portable devotion. Franciscan friars arrived with chests of crosses, medals, and rosary components, most of them cast in base metal and silvered to imitate the sacramental plate reserved for the altar, and these were issued to neophytes at baptism and traded onward through indigenous networks far beyond the mission doctrinas. Archaeology at mission and village sites across the Southeast recovers them regularly, often in burials, where a cross of exactly this flared-terminal type lies at the chest.\n\nThe silvering is not deception so much as economy of grace: a brass core carrying a thin precious surface let a frontier church put the image of the Crucifixion into thousands of hands. That the corpus here is rendered so summarily, a few ridges standing for ribs and cloth, marks it as workshop production rather than presentation work, which is precisely why it survived use. Item # 149442
Estimate:£150.79
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorSculptures
Estimate:
£150.79
ANNA PETRUS. BOKSTÖD, TENN OCH MÄSSING, UTFORMAT SOM LEJON, FÖR FIRMA
09/29/2026
£2,711.59
Est: £2,272.37
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