The Christ Child (Infant of Prague)
- unknown artist
Unknown artist, The Christ Child (Infant of Prague), late 1600s. Ivory; 17 × 6 × 3½ in. Bequest of Robert J. Stroessner, 1992.61.
Sculptures carved from ivory were some of the most desirable exports from the Spanish Philippines to Europe and the Americas. Raw ivory was brought from East Africa or India to Manila, where it was carved by artists of Chinese descent known as sangleys, who endowed the artworks with distinctive characteristics such as the tight curls of Christ’s hair and his fleshy thighs.
This statue shows the Christ Child as the Salvator Mundi (Redeemer of the World), a popular devotion in the early modern world. The most famous statue in the Philippines, the Santo Niño de Cebu, shows another variation of the iconography in the Flemish tradition. This small work in ivory is more closely related to the iconography of the Infant of Prague, a 16th-century wooden statue of the Christ Child sent to the Czech Republic from Spain. This work is likely influenced by the Spanish sculptural tradition, as in examples by the Sevillian sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés (1568–1649).
– Kathryn Santner, Frederick and Jan Mayer Fellow of Spanish Colonial Art, 2023
- "Splendors of the Golden Age: Three Centuries of Spanish Colonial Art," Walt Disney World Epcot Center, 1987.