From the first testimonies of history, the reduced format of sculptures was intimately linked to the objects closest to man and his cultural environment. The proximity of this small size and the verism of the tangible, had in the secluded environment of enclosures and domestic spaces, fertilized fields of expansion. The oratories, cloister chapels and private devotions demanded small sculptures that favored a greater identification with the divine, that brought the great closer through the direct contact with the minuscule. The size gave rise to anecdote and humanized the characters through attributes and other adornments. The materials themselves helped to make the divine much more real. In addition to wood, polychrome lead, baked clay or colored wax, easy to model, contributed to transmit sensations of proximity to the image and its transcendence. Many of them had their place in domestic spaces and convents along with relics and other small objects made of exquisite materials.

This sculpture subject reached great popularity in the Baroque period, in a context Pass for its diffusion, always with the aim of moving. In general, they were intended to promote and encourage an intimate worship, typical of some conventual and private spaces. If the painting was a creation of modernity, allowing its transfer from one place to another, because of its size, the small images of the Child Jesus, of the Virgin, or of the Passion of Christ were gaining space in private homes, oratories and cells of female cloistered monasteries.

Unfortunately, most of these pieces have lost their urns or showcases, mentioned in the documentation of past centuries as showcases. The Diccionario de Autoridades defines the latter as: "jewels made in the manner of an alhacena or almário with its doors and shelves inside to keep buxerías, fine muds and other delicate things, which women use a lot in their dais rooms to keep their charms". They were an inseparable and singular part of the Spanish noble interiors, either with nativity scenes, processional pasos or with images of the Child Jesus or the Virgin in her different advocations. The intimacy of the small format of the imago pietatis was combined in those receptacles with the ornamentation of popular taste and feeling.

As might be expected, in a context such as the Counter-Reformation, in which processions and brotherhoods experienced a spectacular expansion, the prototypes of the titular figures of those associations were copied to satisfy private devotion, both in prints and in small sculptural versions, multiplied, in some cases, by means of wax or clay molds. Coming from various private collections and convents, we will focus on some of these pieces, leaving for another occasion the small Crucifixions and images of the Virgin of Sorrows, as well as the Passionary Children.

A Christ at the column with Bavarian resonances

Very Pass for contemplation in the period of Lent and Holy Week, the passage of Christ at the column was presented, often glossed in the texts of classics such as those of Fray Luis de Granada or Santa Brigida that excited the compassion of the faithful to contemplate a humiliated Christ, bleeding all over his body and accepting suffering. 

We know several images of small format with the iconography of the flagellation, but we are going to stop in one of the middle of the XVIII century that, more than by artistic quality, is A by its iconographic interest. It represents Christ before a column leave and tied to it by chains that start from his arms to which are attached with shackles. Regarding the column leave, there is nothing strange about a work of that chronology having it, quite the contrary, since from the end of the 16th century the tall column was replaced by another more reduced in height, related to the one conserved in the church of Santa Praxedes in Rome since the 13th century. With this, dramatic effects were gained, since the figure lost its point of support and had to stoop before the scourging that, not finding impediment, slammed chest and back.

The exceptionality of the chains and rings is much greater, since they lead us to a specific model which is none other than the holder of the Bavarian sanctuary of Wies, an exceptional rococo work, built between 1745 and 1754 by the brothers Dominicus and Hojann Baptist Zimmermann, which since 1983 has belonged to the World Heritage Site by declaration of Unesco. 

The titular image is a pathetic Christ at the column with its particular history that dates back to 1730, when the Premonstratensians of Steingaden built an image of Christ scourged with pieces of other images and canvases, insisting on the pathetic, with blood and wounds everywhere. After a short time, the sculpture remained without special cult, until in 1738 the peasant Maria Lory prayed before it and the miracle of Wies occurred, when she felt drops of tears on the face of the image, which led to a great movement of pilgrimages, which forced to build a small chapel that soon proved insufficient to accommodate the pilgrims. As it is known, the ropes will be those that acquire the protagonism in the scene of the flagellation at the time of representing the subjection of Christ to the column, but there were not lacking panegyrists, citing St. Jerome, who pointed out the presence of chains from the very moment of the arrest. The shackles had their point of comparison with those of St. Peter, preserved in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and the chains themselves would be evoked by St. Basil in dealing with the stole of the priest to recall the passion of Christ. Moreover, for some time and in some environments it was believed and spread that the supposed chains had been preserved in Jerusalem with the power to drive away demons that tormented people.

The image of that prototype was widely disseminated through engravings of greater or lesser category, especially those signed by Klauber, and even small sculptures by famous artists such as Franz Ignaz Günter of the Institute of Arts in Detroit, dated 1754, as well as other much more popular anonymous ones, sometimes with their urns. The fact of having been the object of great pilgrimages favored that multiplication, where the chains with the shackles on the forearms of Christ and other details such as the bulbous column, the purity cloth with a hanging part in the upper area, as well as the attitude of the scourged Christ were never lacking. As in other sanctuaries of great popularity in Europe, prints, medals and reproductions of the sculpture could be acquired in the days of pilgrimages, making their particular journey over time. Some are in museums such as the Detroit sculpture, others are in private collections and others are still on sale at auctions.

The image that we comment and has served for this excursus is one of many that came out of that sanctuary or made at the request of a devotee in view of its engraved prints. Possibly, it was executed in German workshops, from where small polychrome wooden figures were made for nativity scenes in the second half of the 18th century.

In terracotta: an Ecce homo from 1687 and steps from Granada

Simple and austere, well modeled and not Exempt of nobility is a polychrome clay dated on the back of the pedestal in 1687. The topic of this moment of Christ's passion has its textual source in the Gospel of St. John (19, 1-5), when Pilate presents Christ to the people after the scourging and crowning with thorns. However, the fortune of topic had more to do with the emancipation of the figure of Christ separated from the passage, segregating him from the rest of the characters in the story. Thus, the isolated image very suitable for close contemplation, and individual meditation acquires a symbolic value, since it summarizes the passion and its meaning, something that is accentuated by the reduction of the figure to the bust. However, this isolation generates an iconographic imprecision, since it is confused with the crowning of thorns, and even with the Christ of humility or patience, seated and pensive, and with the Man of Sorrows.

As usual, the bust of Christ is presented with his hands tied and with the mantle on his back, with his arms crossed in an attitude of submission. The topic was known in Castile, but it was in the Andalusian school where he acquired a great development in the plastic, corresponding to Pedro de Mena the definition of one of the types with greater fortune and diffusion.

From the lands of Granada came out much later, in the XIX century, for the delight and adornment of families and institutions, some leaded showcases with the recreation of steps of those lands. We know a couple of them that represent the Holy Supper and the whole passage of the Crucifixion, with the moment in which the Roman centurion Longinos, on horseback, prepares to pierce the side of Christ.

The Recoletas recumbent

It is a tradition in some cloistered convents that, until the first decades of the 20th century, when there was still enough time, there were nuns specialized in manual works: small chapels, cells, conventinos, miniature reproductions of refectories, choirs and even oratories. The recipients of these pieces were their relatives or benefactors. When the nuns made their profession, they sent to their homes a cell or a doll dressed in the habit of the order, or a showcase with an image inside with wax ornaments and flowers. The Baroness de Aulnoy in her Relation d'un voyage en Espagne (1690), describes with enthusiasm the Spanish shop windows as "a sort of little cabinet closed with a large glass and full of everything that is possible to imagine of rarest" being these "the most beautiful thing I have found there [in Spain]".

The Augustinian Recollect Nuns keep a curious showcase, from the end of the 18th century, composed of a sculpture of a recumbent Christ surrounded by a multitude of small images of nuns, with the habits of the order and made with clay molds. There is no doubt that it is a reduction of a choral act of a pious exercise around the death of Christ, to which so many pages are dedicated in the devotionals of past centuries. The well known text of Father Luis de Granada on the topic is very powerful and revives so many moments of Holy Saturday when the nuns contemplated this passage before the great sculpture of the recumbent: "O dead Christ, who mortifies the living and gives life to the dead! O you angels of paradise, do not be indignant against me (though sinful and evil) ....,".

At Capuchinas de Tudela

We will emphasize a couple of pieces: the Christ with the cross on his back and the Christ Man of Sorrows. The first is a dress image from the 18th century, it was taken out in a cloistered procession on Holy Thursday by the nuns and was placed on an altar where the image of the Virgin of Sorrows was worshipped.

The second represents Christ seated on a seat, with his head crowned with thorns. The piece must date from the middle of the 17th century and could possibly have arrived with the foundresses from Toledo in 1736. Its cardinals and wounds place us after the flagellation and crowning with thorns and always before the crucifixion. The iconography of Christ meditating his own destiny, seated on a rock, waiting for the crucifixion enjoyed a certain popularity for its emotional impact and was a very widespread topic from Dürer's prints. In painting, it was represented as an Italian "pensiero" by painters such as Luis de Vargas in the Sevillian school, and Luis de Morales himself. By Patricio Cajés and Horacio Borghiani there are versions in Navarre at topic, with other formal connotations. Professor Rodríguez de Ceballos has studied the post-Tridentine and devotional connotations of this subject of images in an interesting article. The diffusion of the topic, as in most cases, came about thanks to the Flemish and Italian prints and engravings that reached the painters' workshops in the different regional centers. The topic enjoyed wide diffusion in Andalusia and Hispanic America.
 

The latest: child-scaled steps

Times evolve and the last samples of small format pasos have appeared in the reductions of the prototypes. In some towns like Cintruénigo, the brotherhoods have the reductions of the big pasos to be carried by children, children of the brotherhoods, in front of the big paso. María Paz Larraondo, in her Ethnographic Study of Cintruénigo (1990) referred to this custom and its recent innovation. In Corella, there are three "pasos" of these characteristics, which do not go out in procession. They are those corresponding to the Dolorosa, the Sepulcro, and the Cristo del Perdón. They are exhibited in the place of the Rosary, on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, inside an urn so that the visitors and Corellanos can contemplate them and as a means to obtain donations.