Large 19th C. Spanish Colonial Wood Saint with Lodged Bullets

North America, Mexico, Spanish Colonial. A monumental santo carved from a single baulk of hardwood, the figure standing frontal and serene with hands drawn together at the breast in prayer. A veil falls in heavy lobes to either side of the rounded face, framing lidded eyes and a small closed mouth; below, the mantle breaks into broad vertical folds that taper to a plain plinth-like base. The surface has weathered to a silvered brown, its original polychrome and gesso long gone, leaving the grain and drying checks as the sculpture's only ornament. Almost certainly a Virgin, made for a church or cathedral niche and carried in procession. Two lead bullets remain lodged in the wood, with further impact scars across the body, testimony that this image stood witness to armed conflict, perhaps the insurgencies and anticlerical violence that swept 19th century Mexico. Santos, devotional images of the Virgin and saints, were the central furniture of religious life across New Spain and its successor republics. Larger examples like this one (called bultos when carved in the round) occupied altar niches and were dressed in fabric vestments on feast days, then shouldered through the streets in procession. Provincial workshops frequently carved them from a single trunk of cedar, mesquite, or colorin, a method that explains the deep radial checks seen on surviving examples. Mexico's long 19th century was punishing to church property: the War of Independence (1810 to 1821), the Reform War (1857 to 1861), the French Intervention, and the later Cristero unrest all saw sanctuaries occupied, looted, and used as strongpoints. Firearm damage to a sacred image is uncommon but not unknown, and it converts a devotional object into a historical document. Metallurgical analysis of the embedded projectiles could narrow the date and the conflict considerably. Item # 204462

Estimate:£2,459.42

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