JUAN DE MESA Y VELASCO (Córdoba, 1583 - Sevilla,... Lot n° 708

St. John the Baptist Carved and polychrome wood 164 x 82 x 73 cm This sculpture represents St. John the Baptist standing, holding in his left hand the closed sacred book with the symbolic lamb or Agnus Dei seated on it. The other hand is not directed to point to this lamb, but to the front with a gesture of elegance, as if in dialogue with the believer. The saint wears the traditional brown camel skin and a red cloak that slightly peeks out from the sides of the figure. The formal features of the image present the characteristics of the style of the sculptor Juan de Mesa, as well as the solution of the head, especially the details of the hair, eyes and beard of the head, besides the vertical folds with volume and strong contrast in its modulation that generate strong chiaroscuro, as well as the movement of the mantle. _x000D_ The Cordovan sculptor Juan de Mesa was trained in the Sevillian workshop of Juan Martínez Montañés, so some of his early works reflect the classic and serene spirit of the master. The artist died relatively young, as he lived forty-four years, and his activity is documented in the decades of 1610 and 1620. In this short period he produced an important and valuable production, in which his Crucified Christs stand out, which for centuries were considered works of Martínez Montañés due to their magnificent quality. His catalog of sculptures includes two Saint John the Baptists in which the evolution of his style in those few years can be clearly appreciated (fig. 1 and 3). He achieved his own style and a particular way of conceiving the figure with greater expressiveness and vigor in the modeling of the surfaces, resolving the folds with greater dynamism. Some vertical folds are twisted forming cartridges with curves and counter-curves, as we can appreciate in some of his documented works: the mantle of the Saint Joseph with the walking Child of the parish church of Santa María de las Nieves of the Sevillian town of Fuentes de Andalucía made in 1615-1616; the mantle fluttering in the air with its sinuous edge as the Assumption of the parish church of the Magdalena of Seville that he carved in 1619 (fig.8); one end of the shroud of the Christ of the Good Death of the brotherhood of the Students of Seville that he made a year later or the one of the same invocation of the church of San Pedro and San Pablo of Lima (Peru), the end of the mantle of San Ramón Nonato that he made at the end of his life for the Convent of the Merced of Seville, nowadays Museum of Fine Arts. With this sculptural concept, of a strong pictorial character, the sculptor contributed a dynamic element to the image, whose compositional solution (curled folding of one end of the cloak or shroud and its placement in flight) is presented in a similar way in the Saint John the Baptist we are studying. A dynamism absent in the aesthetic ideology of his master and in the other artists of Juan de Mesa's time. _x000D_ The serenity of the composition of the saint carved in 1623-1624 for the Cartuja de Nuestra Señora de las Cuevas de Sevilla, currently in the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (fig.1), contrasts with the figure of the saint kept in the convent of Santa María la Real de Bormujos, of Dominican nuns (fig 3). The sculpture of St. John the Baptist that we analyze has the formal characteristics of this second saint. _x000D_ Juan de Mesa learned the art of sculpture in the workshop of Juan Martínez Montañés when the latter was making the architecture, sculptures and reliefs of the main altarpiece of the Monastery of San Isidoro del Campo in the Sevillian town of Santiponce, one of his main works. Mesa intervened in the background in that artistic enterprise in which Martínez Montañés carved the first known Saint John the Baptist by this master (fig. 4). In addition to this work, Martínez Montañés made different images and reliefs of this holy precursor of Jesus for Lima (Peru), for several convents of nuns in Seville (Santa María del Socorro, San Leandro, Santa Clara and Santa Paula) and for a chapel in the Cathedral (fig. 5 and 6); in addition to the corpulent sculpture attributed to him in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There is a great formal difference between the works of the master and the disciple, in which Mesa created his own scheme and expressive resources. Professor José Hernández Díaz, the first biographer and great connoisseur of these two artists, summarized masterfully the differences between both artists with respect to the iconography of St. John the Baptist: "poise, serenity, balance, grace and poetry in the mountain; movement, realism, elegance, expressive strength in the disciple, baroque in short "2. 2._x000D_x000D_ The three Saint Johns (the two catalogued and the one we add) are standing. We consider that our Saint John is a work made between the only two known so far. The one we study shares with the image