Christ of Grace of Las Navas del Marqués (Cristo de Gracia de Las Navas del Marqués)
- Melchor Pérez Holguín, Bolivian, 1660-1732
- Born: Cochabamba
- Work Locations: Potosi, Bolivia
Melchor Pérez Holguín, Christ of Grace of Las Navas del Marqués, 1701-1720s. Oil paint on canvas; 67¾ × 53 in. New World Department/Deaccessions Fund, 1997.147.
During the late 1600s and 1700s, Melchor Pérez Holguín was one of the most prolific and innovative painters working in the southern Andes in the Spanish-ruled Viceroyalty of Peru. Born around 1660 in Cochabamba (present-day Bolivia), Holguín likely moved to the imperial city of Potosí during his teenage years, where he learned the art of painting from a master yet to be identified. From at least 1678, he worked as a master painter in his own right and enjoyed a long career that continued into the 1720s. His diverse clientele included monastic orders, churches, confraternities, municipal agencies, private individuals, and the open art market in and near the prosperous, mining-based city of Potosí. Holguín was a self-aware artist who frequently signed his paintings; at least twice he included his own portrait within large, prestigious commissions, presenting himself as a learned, lettered, and successful practitioner of his art.
Holguín’s status as the preeminent painter in Potosí and his established connections to elite patrons were likely factors in him receiving the commission for this painting. Made sometime after 1701, the painting is a type of picture commonly referred to as “statue painting,” a genre in which specific miracle-working sculptures and their shrines are replicated in a two-dimensional painting. Statue paintings, as well as “statue prints,” provided devotees with the ability to pay devotion to the acclaimed original image from afar by way of a pictorial reproduction. This painting recreates a miraculous sculpture from a church in the small town of Las Navas del Marqués in Castile, Spain, known as “Christ of Grace of Las Navas del Marqués.” Holguín’s painting is based on a print from about 1701 by the Spanish engraver Gregorio Fosman y Medina. Although the painting closely follows the printed source, Holguín’s considerable skills as a painter are evident throughout the work, as in his sensitive portrayal of Christ’s features and the delicate rendering of lace on Christ’s skirt-like garment, called a sudario. The vignettes surrounding the interior image illustrate miraculous events related to the statue. These small scenes are also present in the print, but Holguín enhanced their depth and visual interest by adding background landscapes composed of muted shades of green, brown, and blue.
For more information see Jeffrey Schrader, “Statue Paintings: The Wayfaring Marian Images of Spain in Bolivia,” in The Art of Painting in Colonial Bolivia, edited by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, 233-52. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2017.
--Sabena Kull, 2017-18 Mayer Fellow for Spanish Colonial Art
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