The National Sculpture Museum of Valladolid exhibited a few years ago a set of pieces around a sample entitled Figuras de la exclusión. A look from the religious image. Throughout its four sections dedicated to the so-called "useless to the world, the mark of Cain, Fuga mundi and women's lives", the visitor was offered a general look at everything related to marginalization and exclusion, in a particular vision of the history of people without history.

In the following paragraphs we will briefly review some pieces of Navarre's heritage, where illness and poverty are reflected, in final social exclusion, a topic very much to the taste of historians but which has played a secondary role as far as the history of art is concerned, since the programs of study of this last discipline has been oriented, for obvious reasons of abundance of pieces, on those protagonists of the past who were in the social summit in wealth and power, people of Court, monarchs, princes, great patrons and eminent personages of the State and the Church.

Religious art, which is the majority in our society, offers and documents masterfully, in some rare cases, the reality of those marginalized inhabitants, who lived their status in a difficult and torn way. We will leave for another occasion the representation of other very significant minorities such as prisoners, heretics, prostitutes, Jews or slaves that constitute groups of interest, due to their scarce representations.

Sores, wounds, crutches, wooden legs, nudity, immobility, extreme thinness, bandaged heads and other body parts were the ways of showing illness and poverty, which frequently went hand in hand. Camino Oslé dedicated some pages to the characterization of the poor in his study on the Casa de Misericordia of Pamplona, always a work of reference letter, where he analyzes the phenomenon of poverty in Navarre in past centuries.

Poverty and disease in some medieval examples

Poverty and social assistance to the needy constituted an ever-present reality in the past, with different responses in different contexts. However, the positions in relation to them were very ambiguous. Up to the end of the Age average, poverty was conceived as a positive value because it was understood that it served as test to achieve sanctification and as a means of sharing for the rich. The subject of the poor and marginalized presented ragged clothes and physical deficiencies as one of its main characteristics and an element of identification to be recognized as such and to be able to practice begging.

An excellent example of the sick person is embodied in the capital of Job from the Romanesque cloister of the cathedral of Pamplona, currently in the Museum of Navarre, a work A in its style in the Hispanic panorama that dates from the mid-twelfth century. Along with Tobias, Job is the character of the Old Law that most insistently embodies patience in the Lord. The harassment and torments to which he was subjected by the devil were interpreted as prefigurations of the scorn and passion of Christ, and also as a foretaste of the persecutions suffered by the Church. St. Gregory the Great's celebrated work Expositio in Librum beati Job sive Moralia undoubtedly contributed to this.

On one of the faces of Job's capital the final passages of his story are narrated in two moments. In the first one, sample with his wife, suffering from his painful illness with his body covered with pustules, holding with his left hand a helmet to scratch himself to avoid the itching. The second moment presents the just and patient Job before God, with the consequent healing and scarring of the sores on his upper body. The sculptor, very didactically, represents the healed ulcers without relief, while the remaining ones in the lower part maintain the relief.

The image of the poor, as in successive times, was especially present in the figure of St. Martin splitting his cloak with the poor. It is a representation of the charity of St. Martin, which tells how the saint, in a rigorous winter, was in Amiens when he found a naked poor man and with his sword he parted his cloak in two and gave a part to the needy. That same night, while he was sleeping, Christ appeared to him in a dream dressed in that piece of his cloak.

Among the examples of 12th century Romanesque sculpture with the topic in which the saint on horseback is repeated, parting his cloak with his sword and the poor man at his feet, half-naked and with scarcela, we find capitals in San Martín de Unx, San Miguel de Estella, Tudela - cloister and doorway in the cathedral - and the monastery of Irache. Its presence on church doors made perfect sense to encourage the faithful to give alms for the poor, with the same generosity as the saint. The panel of the altarpiece of the Santos Juanes de Muruzábal altarpiece, in which the poor man covers his nakedness with the average cloak, and the sculpture of Irurre belong to the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the following century. Of popular character and also from the Gothic period is the same topic developed in a relief reused in the walls of the parish of Beriain.

In other passages from the lives of saints, the indigent also play a leading role, as in the 12th century Romanesque capital of the cloister of San Pedro de la Rúa in Estella, where the distribution among the needy by St. Lawrence of the treasures and goods of the Church entrusted to him by Pope St. Sixtus is narrated. Likewise, the Gospel text of the rich Epulon and the poor Lazarus provides a good example to contemplate the iconography of the needy and hungry. In the Romanesque cloister of the cathedral of Tudela we can see the aforementioned story translated into stone in one of its capitals.

A special and singular case is found in the intermediate archivolt of the Romanesque doorway of San Pedro de Echano, from the first third of the 12th century, in which there are several figures seated behind the bocel, including a pair of lame musicians, with amputated feet, who support themselves with a wooden leg. The set, studied by Agustín Gómez, presents a total of twenty-six characters with long disheveled hair, one with a torn dress and another with a knife. Those data led the aforementioned researcher to identify them as poor and marginalized and to relate them to those common places in certain acts of charity and in singular ceremonies, in tune with the discourteous guests of St. Matthew (XXII, 1-10). In this regard, it should be remembered that charity was codified at different times of the year, with the obligation to protect and welcome the poor and the sick.

A report of the Father of Orphans of Pamplona from 1593.

Salinas Quijada regrets in his study on the Father of Orphans in Navarre, the lack of data about the topic in Pamplona, referring to a memorial of the one who exercised the position in 1592, Miguel de Ollacarizqueta, where he proposed some interesting data on the demand and custom like giving some reals to the orphans who were going to pray the response to the house of the deceased. In another memorandum, kept in the file of the cathedral, signed by the same Ollacarizqueta in 1593, he proposes some reforms around the hospitals of Pamplona, as well as advocating to put an end to the begging of the youngest "because from childhood they get used to it and lose their shame and do not learn official document or art of living and when they grow up they have to come to live or wander and give in many vices and inconveniences".

The text lists the hospitals in the city of Pamplona, institutions that in many cases were simply a domus pauperum. It points out, first of all, the General Hospital and goes on to list eight others and one outside the walls. For the historical interest of the document we transcribe a few paragraphs: "First of all, it should be noted that in the said city outside the said General Hospital there are eight hospitals inside and one outside, near the Magdalena bridge; four inside the said city are in the parish of the main church, two to collect the poor who go or come on pilgrimage to Santiago de Galicia, one is said to be in Santa Catalina to collect men and the other in the house of the dignity of the Hospital to collect women at the cost of the dignity. Two others, which are to collect poor widows, are the one in the street they call the Bishop and is called the Hospital of Corpore Christi and the second is in the street of the Boilermakers in the basilica and brotherhood of St. Martin. Of the other four there is one in front of San Cernin called Santa Catalina, dedicated to the pilgrims who come and go to Santiago, not giving place to men in case women have come. And with the same institution there is another hospital called San Fermín in front of the church of Señor San Llorente. And in this same parish there is another one called Hospital de Pobres Labradores, where there is a stable for men and a stable for women. And the other one with the same institution is in the parish of San Nicolás that is called of San Miguel and the last one that is next to the bridge of the Magdalena, dedicated to gather in him the poor that do not arrive to the doors of the city, when those hallasen closed. It seems superfluous, since for such there are hospitals in Burlada, Villava and other neighboring places. The said hospital is not used except to shelter thieves and thieves that the parents of orphans throw out of the city and then take refuge there and go around robbing and stealing, during the day, all the fruit of the fields and at nightfall, when the city gates are closed, they gather in the said hospital ..... And because at night the father of orphans cannot visit the said hospital, not even during the day very often because he has much to occupy himself with in the said city".

Crippled, destitute in Renaissance arts

The arrival of Humanism in the sixteenth century and later the crisis of the seventeenth century, coincided in some moments with the social weakening, caused in part by epidemics, bad harvests, depopulation, rising prices and falling wages that brought with them an unfavorable status and an alarming increase in the issue of beggars, vagrants, sick and marginalized. Then, an educated current of opinion arose, headed by humanists such as Vives or Domingo de Soto, against the figure of the poor beggar, proposing as a solution the rationalization of charity through an examination of the poor in order to distinguish true beggars from "false" beggars who, under the cover of their status , were really delinquents, vagrants and cheats.

The 16th century has left us countless painted and sculpted images of St. Martin with the poor. The latter, in internship totality of the examples, appears half-naked or dressed in rags, with a crutch and frequently with a wooden leg to accentuate his misfortune. Sometimes he appears as an old man, sometimes as a mature man and sometimes with a bandaged head and bearded. It is worth remembering that Saint Martin is the patron saint with the largest number of parishes in Navarre, exactly ninety-two, issue . In painting, we will highlight the panels of Orísoain, Berriosuso and Lete, from the Oscáriz workshop and belonging to the third quarter of the 16th century, as well as the one of Fitero from the end of the same century.

The reliefs and sculptures of the Renaissance century are very abundant and, in general, of good quality. The examples of Equiza, Artaiz, Peña, Aldaz, Arlegui, Beriain, Obanos, Maquirriain, Labayen and Orcoyen belong to the First Renaissance. Those of Leyún, Adiós, Senosiain, Arbeiza, Arguiñáriz, Esténoz, Legaria, Egüés and Ezcároz, among others, are clearly Romanesque and date from the last decades of the 500s.

Other saints of our heritage linked to works of charity and in relation to the indigent are St. Veremundo and St. Pedro. St. Veremundo de Irache was represented in his reliquary casket performing miracles with the sick and needy of all subject. It is an excellent piece made in 1584 as an ex-voto of Abbot Comontes, after having recovered his health. It is the work of a sculptor named Francisco and Martín de Morgota. In one of its reliefs, the saint is represented healing the sick and crippled, and even a blind man to whom he restores his sight. Another of the passages narrates the moment in which he celebrates mass before an enormous group of people who had come to the monastery because of a famine, while a dove flies over the church, leaving everyone satiated.

The main altarpiece of Ichaso, dedicated to St. Peter, contains an interesting cycle in painted panels of the apostle, made by Juan de Bustamante in the second third of the 16th century. Among the scenes, we find healings and aids of the apostle, based on the evangelical texts.