Among the invocations of the Virgin in Pamplona in past centuries, the Virgin of the Wonders, venerated in the church of the Augustinian Recollect Nuns, has occupied a very prominent place. The origins of a whole devotional "boom" must be related to a marvelous event, whose protagonist was the discalced Carmelite brother Juan de Jesús San Joaquín between 1655 and 1656. A synthesis of what happened places us between two concrete moments: September 14, 1655 and March 17, 1656. The first date corresponds to the vision that the brother had from the roof of his convent of the Discalced Carmelites, when he contemplated the Virgin on the dome of the church of Recoletas, to whom he prayed that the prioress, who was very ill, would not die. The second presents the arrival of the image to the convent, after the aforementioned religious found it in a house next to his convent of the Descalzos. The events would end at the end of 1657 or beginning of 1658, when the sculpture arrived from Madrid, where it was taken for retouching and polychroming. Brother Juan found himself at the moment of unpacking the box in which the sculpture arrived and verified and affirmed that the new pedestal with its cloud coincided, in its form and color, with that of his first vision, on September 14, 1655. On this occasion, coinciding with his feast day, we will dwell on his image.

The sculpture of the Virgen de las Maravillas has been classified, based on the date of its arrival at the convent, in 1656, always including the news of its passage through Madrid, after its defects had been repaired and incarnated in Pamplona. To try to fix its chronology it is necessary to pay attention, on the one hand, to the exact account of the arrival at Recoletas and, on the other hand, to the characteristics, not only of its polychromy, which is quite well fixed in time, but also of the wood sculpture itself, which is totally disfigured by the epidermis of gold and color.

2 Seventeenth-century texts speak of how the image, upon its arrival at the convent, was "disheveled" and "outraged", as well as the determination of the pious nuns to repair that mockery, which even had spider webs and dung. The incarnation to which it was subjected in Pamplona was not to the taste of the nuns, so the sculpture was sent to Madrid, to "gild and paint the face and clothing", that is to say, to polychrome it and incarnate it completely. From these details it can be inferred that the carving was old, old enough for its base to have been badly damaged by humidity or other causes. However, the polychrome applied in Madrid, the new pedestal, the retouching of the head of the Child Jesus bring to the sculpture what was demanded in the middle of the 17th century, in the plenary session of the Executive Council triumph of the Baroque, of the Marian images, which was no longer what was demanded of them decades before. The difficulty in knowing how to read the times of the image and its classification derives precisely from the fact that sculpture is a hybrid art. Moreover, in this case, the polychromy is far removed from the aesthetics of the rounded bulk itself. If we observe his face, with small features, small mouth, despite the repainting of eyebrows and eyelashes, especially contemplating the profile sculpture, we find ourselves before a Renaissance work, before the arrival of Romanism plenary session of the Executive Council, something that also shows the complicated and classic headdress with fabrics in which his face is fitted. The folding of the tunic and mantle are alien, both to the Romanesque style with wide arrangements of the fabrics, as well as to the realism of the first half of the 17th century, when the stiff folds of Valladolid ancestry were imposed. The tunic, in its upper part, is arranged in a fan shape typical of the third quarter of the 16th century and is mixed with the powerful neck of an incipient miguelangelismo. Everything leads us to a good sculptor, with a refinement and exquisiteness, which is masked by the clearly baroque polychromy. The dimensions, without pedestal -it measures one meter in height- also seem to indicate the possible origin of a chapel or house, never of a head of an altarpiece of a great chapel or church. The outline of the Child Jesus, in spite of its incarnation and reformation of the nose and hair, is clearly of Michelangelesque inspiration, although not of Romanesque invoice . His leg, in a swinging movement, comes from drawings by the great Florentine master. Therefore, the sculpture itself was carved around 1570 by a sculptor from Navarre. Regarding the base, the face of the Child and the whole head, we must recognize them as baroque parts of the carving, the first for the little angels and the average moon and the second for the realism that is parallel to that of the free-standing images of the Divine Infant in the second third of the 17th century. The Recollects had experience of the enjoyment of a

3 sculpture from Madrid, arrived not long ago to the convent, in 1649, the Inmaculada de la conference room capitular, work of two great artists established in the court: Manuel Pereira (1588-1683) with polychromy of Francisco Camilo (1615-1673), masters in which possibly fell the intervention in the carving of the Virgen de las Maravillas, although to Pereira polychromed other sculptures Jusepe Leonardo, Luis Fernandez or Felipe Sanchez. The natural polychromy, applied after having been retouched and updated in Madrid at the end of 1657 or beginning of 1658, constitutes, together with the base with angels, hairpieces and trousseau, the true baroque finish of the piece. The stewed work is concentrated in the garments of the vestments on their canonical colors and cracked backgrounds. The red dress is dotted with sgraffito flowers outlined and retouched, while the blue mantle sample bouquets. Both the Virgin's headdress and the Child's purity cloth, both in white, are sgraffitoed with rhomboidal grids.