He is one of the most popular Catholic saints. His cult is universally spread and he is invoked as a thaumaturge, defender of children, to find lost objects and to find a partner. Saint Anthony was a Portuguese Franciscan born in Lisbon at the end of the 12th century, a great preacher who died in 1231 at the age of thirty-six after a long apostolic life in Italy. He was elevated to the altars in an unusually short period of time, when the year of his death, in 1232, had not yet passed. In 1946 he was declared a doctor of the Church. The Franciscans in all their branches and particularly the Capuchins were the ones who spread his cult through his many deeds and miracles: preaching to the fish, healing the sick, with the kneeling mule, showing the heart of a miser in a chest... etc... Famous are the cycles of his life carried out by Donatello in his basilica, Niccolo di Pietro Gerini in San Francesco Prado or the frescoes of St. Anthony of Florida by Goya.

He is represented as beardless and young in the habit of his order, brown or dark gray, girded with the cord with the knots alluding to the vows ¿poverty, chastity and obedience¿ and wide tonsure. From the writings of Saint Bernardine of Siena, we know that he was of corpulent aspect and short of stature, although the usual iconography preferred to sweeten his physiognomy and to insist on the kindness or gallantry of his person. As personal attributes he carries the lily of purity, the book alluding to his biblical knowledge and his sermons and, from the 16th century and the period of the Counter-Reformation, the image of the Child Jesus, in memory of a famous apparition. Alonso Cano, Zurbarán, Claudio Coello, Murillo, Gaspar de Crayer and many other 17th century painters represented him with the Divine Infant in paintings that would echo into the 20th century.

Brotherhoods in Navarra

Gregorio Silanes lists a good issue of confraternities dedicated to the saint in the Comunidad Foral, among them those of Pamplona, Lodosa, Sangüesa, Aibar, Falces, Unzué, Olóriz, Echagüe, Amunarrizqueta, Tudela, Corella and Cascante. In these last localities of the Ribera, they were associated with the guilds of tailors. In Fitero it grouped the weavers.

Those groups and the Franciscan and Capuchin friars spread from their convents their cult in many towns and regions, from La Ribera to Baztán. Various customs have survived until a few decades ago. Large roscones to raffle or distribute on his feast day in Corella or Fitero, various votive offerings in the Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love of Guembe linked to children late to speak, or figurines in Lodosa, where a silver reliquary of the saint is preserved.

The novenas published in the presses of Pamplona, such as the one published in 1753, popularized his life and deeds, together with the sermons on his feast day and the musicalized jozos that helped to learn about his exploits. One of his couplets read as follows: "You heal the mute and crippled, paralytics, lepers, furious demoniacs, you restore the senses, you return the lost goods and you cure all pains". In printed matter and novenaries he is even referred to as the Hercules of the Church. In the reliquaries and jewels his image in small size also became popular.

Tiles and street chapels are also found in different localities and are a good testimony of their worship in the past. In Fitero, for example, three niches were located in its streets. The most spectacular, one made in stucco of great dimensions, baroque of the end of the XVII century, already disappeared, of which a photograph is conserved and of the most important in its typology in Navarre. Such abundance has to be put in relation with the coplilla that was sung in the riverside town that said: "So many oranges in China, so many lemons on the ground, so many women without husbands, as there are in this Fitero". Until the middle of the 20th century, certain single women kidnapped the Child from the arms of their images, not returning it until they found the desired groom.
Among the last realities that bore the name of the Saint is the Escolanía founded in 1940, the Sociedad Juventud de San Antonio (1956), or the high school in Capuchinos outside the walls, closed in 1989.

Unique images and canvases

Most of the iconography of the saint in Navarre corresponds to the 17th and 18th centuries, in the Baroque period, as well as to the 20th century in the numerous sculptures of the school of Olot. At present, about thirty altarpieces are preserved under his invocation, highlighting the Baroque ones of Corella (1671), Luquin (1716), Sada (1726), Azcona (1730), Franciscans of Olite (1761) and Iturmendi, remodeled at the end of the century. Some of them had special significance in the regional arts, such as the aforementioned Corella, which was the first in which Solomonic columns were used in the locality, causing them to be introduced in the great main altarpiece of the Rosary on a large scale.

A relief from the Zúñiga altarpiece belongs to the Renaissance period, a work made after 1563 by Juan de Ayala II and Diego de Ayala. The carvings of Santesteban and the altarpiece of Cáseda, the latter the work of Juan de Anchieta, are from invoice Romanesque. Some 17th century reliefs and sculptures stand out for their importance, such as those of the altarpieces of Sesma, Sarasa and Alsasua, and the round sculptures of San Saturnino de Pamplona from the Franciscan convent of the capital of Navarre, in the late Romanesque style, that of the main altarpiece of the Clarisas de Estella, work of the Madrid sculptor Juan Ruiz (1679), that of the Conceptionists of Estella or the Capuchins of Sangüesa, a work related to Andalusian plastic art and the models of Cano and Pedro de Mena. Of all these examples the relief of Sesma, work of Juan III Imberto realized from 1625, is of special interest because it incorporates a more unusual attribute in the iconography I antoniana: a bunch of grapes that an angel holds over the saint and that alludes to a miracle according to which a man of little faith, in a banquet, took some vine shoots and a cup in his hands and said "If St. Anthony made grapes grow on these vine shoots and that we swell from them this cup of must, this would be a miracle for me". Immediately, leaves and ripe grapes sprouted from the vine shoots, which were squeezed and gave the must with which the cup was filled.

Exceptional for the topic in Navarra is the relief of the altarpiece of Milagro with the scene of the kneeling mule, so popular in European painting and sculpture. It is the work of Sebastián de Sola y Calahorra (1680-1684). As is known, it represents the passage of the conversion of a Jew, dressed as such, who doubted the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The saint got the animal to disdain the provision of oats and knelt before the Sacred Form that the saint presented to him. The presence in the altarpiece of the reliefs of the Stigmatization of St. Francis and the donkey of St. Anthony could be related to some prints that he may have known in the convent of the Poor Clares of Nájera, where he had worked, or that were provided by the Franciscans of Tudela or Tafalla, with whom he maintained a professional relationship throughout his life. An excellent version of topic was made by Vicente Berdusán for the chapel of the Villahermosa family in the seminar of San Carlos Borromeo in Zaragoza.

As for the sculptures of the first half of the 18th century, we must mention the sculpture of the altarpiece in Recoletas de Pamplona, work of the sculptor Juan de Peralta from Tudela (1712), those of Berbinzana and Mirafuentes, the dynamic sculpture of Arruazu and that of the parish of Sesma, already of the central decades of the century and of courtly style. In the second half of the century, the sculpture of Meano, paid for by Joaquín de Apellániz in 1761, stands out, although the work of greatest quality is the one that presides over the chapel of the Marquises of Feria in the Franciscans of Olite, attributed by García Gainza to Juan Pascual de Mena (c. 1760). At the end of the Age of Enlightenment, a subject with the saint half-kneeling on a large cloud of rococo design became popular, as can be seen in the parishes of Echalaz and Larraga.

As far as paintings on canvas are concerned, most of them represent the vision of the Child Jesus, with or without the Virgin. The painting of the main altarpiece of Funes, the work of Vicente Berdusán is a work of quality. In the altarpiece of San Veremundo de Grocin there is a very simple painting from the beginning of the 17th century. Among the stories of the apparition we must remember the one that tells us that in May 1231, after having preached his last Lent in Padua, he moved to Verona and from there to the castle of Camposampiero of Count Tisso, where a community of Franciscan religious lived. In the woods of the castle, next to a gigantic walnut tree, the saint had a small hut built, where he spent most of the day and night in meditation and prayer. It was here that the vision of the Child Jesus took place. Count Tisso, who often visited and spied on his famous guest, witnessed how the saint held the Child Jesus in his arms. It was he who warned him that the count had witnessed it. The saint forbade the count to divulge it until he had died.

Other hagiographers speak of an apparition of the Virgin giving her the Child. Generally, they are paintings preserved in some enclosures of discreet value. In the canvas of the parish of the Rosary of Corella it is accompanied by musical angels, in the Carmelitas of the same city is the most complicated composition with numerous angels and the Child standing and in the parish of San Miguel is a copper of the middle of the XVIII century with the same tena. In Javier and in San Nicolás de Pamplona there are two copper pieces of great quality, very remarkable, and in the Casa de Misericordia de Tudela, the well-known scene in a very elegant garland of flowers and of good invoice that could be related to the works of the painter Matías Guerrero in the last decades of the XVII century. The towns of Valtierra, Estella or Caparroso preserve baroque canvases with the aforementioned scene.

But the great reference in images of the life of the saint is found in the church of San Antonio de Pamplona. A true cycle painted by the painter Sánchez Cayuela gathers six passages of his life in the apse: his mother in Portugal holding the newborn, the taking of habits in the Franciscan Order and his monastic life, his first mass, his trip to Italy by boat and, finally, his most repeated image, with the Child Jesus raised in his arms. Two more scenes are represented in the lateral half points: the saint preaching to the fish and raising a dead man from the dead. In the same temple you can admire a good copy of Murillo with the topic of the saint with the Child Jesus, a work from the beginning of the last century by the Capuchin friar Pedro de Madrid.