As we have repeatedly pointed out in these same pages, genre scenes, as such, did not exist until the 17th century in European art. It was then when a trend emerged that gradually replaced the transcendent with the anecdotal and the mundane, at final, with immediate reality. In Navarre, with great delay, it would be the arrival of photography, in the 19th century, which would be linked to everything related to daily life, although from the beginning of the 20th century, we have notable examples in works by the painters Ciga, Zubiri, García Asarta, Pérez Torres, or Natalio Hualde.

In order to recreate daily life in past centuries, we use religious art, which offers parallels for the recreation of different passages of daily life, if we know how to read them correctly. The fact of resorting to religious representations allows us to focus on details, sometimes of a secondary nature, where facts of daily life emerge with a certain freedom. In other cases, the interest lies in the verisimilitude of the sacred passage, which demanded to be represented as if it were a story of mortals.

The worries, fears and emotions of pregnant women and women in labor sought relief in the saints and Marian invocations. Among the saints to whom our ancestors turned to implore their intercession in pregnancies and childbirth, Saint Ramón Nonato stood out, throughout the whole of Navarre, from Roncal to La Ribera. In Pamplona, this protection was led, especially among married couples who did not obtain succession, by Saint Joaquin, who had a very powerful confraternity in the Discalced Carmelites and a great advocate in the figure of Brother Juan de Jesús San Joaquín (1590-1669), whose prodigies were well known in the capital of Navarre. Likewise, a Marian invocation, that of the Virgin of the Wonders of the Augustinian Recollect Nuns, was until the middle of the 20th century, the reference of devotional attention on the part of many pregnant women. They would go to the convent's lathe to apply for to see the measurements of the Virgin, printed on silk, as a true protective talisman in their state of good hope.

This Mercedarian saint was born around 1200, in the town of Portell, in the region of Segarra, near Barcelona. He received his name from the Viscount of Cardona, Ramon Folch, who, as we shall see, was the person who decided to open the womb of his mother, now deceased, to prevent the death of the child. His surname Sarrió was replaced by Nonato, for not having been born naturally. From shepherd to Mercedarian religious and cardinal, his life was marked by the successive redemptions of captives in which he participated.

His cult in Navarra was widespread, favored by the Mercedarian convents of Pamplona, Tudela, Sangüesa, Corella and Estella. The altarpieces dedicated to him, the distribution of water blessed with his relics, the circulation of holy cards and his images, together with novenas and other prayers, speak of his popularity.

Gregorio Silanes documents brotherhoods under his patronage in Sangüesa (Santiago and the Merced of 1713), Villafranca (1720), Lumbier (1738), Falces and Andosilla. In the establishment of some of them it is not necessary to discard the influence of the ranchers who worshipped him because the saint had worked as a shepherd before professing as a religious. In Pitillas, where he is venerated as patron saint, the Goñi family of herdsmen seems to have been behind his cult. The ex-voto of Don Ramón de Goñi, next to the cattle and about to be devoured by a bear in 1743, is proof of this. Some members of the family held positions in the local mesta and had cattle as their main source of income source . Bullfighting celebrations on the occasion of their feast are documented in Pitillas and Dicastillo.

As far as hermitages are concerned, there were hardly any under his patronage. That of Muniain de la Solana had its origin in 1713, in gratitude for having healed a woman with the water of the saint, who was blessed with his relic. Her husband offered all the stone necessary for its construction and the amount of 100 reales.

Iconographically, the saint is identified by his Mercedarian habit, the cardinal's cape, a monstrance in memory of his miraculous viaticum, a palm with three crowns alluding to virgin, martyr and confessor and, frequently, the padlock sealing his lips, the torment to which he was subjected in Algiers, in 1236. For this last fact, in the Mercedarian redemption of that year, he was called "martyr without dying". His sculptures are very abundant, highlighting the eighteenth-century Muniain de la Solana, Sesma and Lesaca.

There are not many representations of his birth, despite the popularity that the passage reached among the preachers and the joys of his novena, also published in the capital of Navarre. Nor have any examples of the scene been preserved in Spanish painting by a renowned painter, as is the case with other passages from his childhood and youth, painted by Eugenio Cajés and Francisco Pacheco. There is no doubt that, as a prodigious fact, it must have been present in the series of the Mercedarian convents. Among the examples we know of the birth are the paintings of the parish of Bijuesca (Celedón García, 1645) and of the Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love de la Concepción de Ceheguín in Murcia, an eighteenth-century work inspired by the saint's joys.

In Navarre, it will be in some canvases of his double vision in which Christ and the Virgin comforted him with their presence, where in a small vignette the passage of his coming to the world is depicted, specifically in Olite, Pitillas, Arellano and Andosilla. In other localities the same vision was represented, but without the scene we studied: -Caparroso, Valtierra, Funes, Tudela and Roncal- and even with the Trinity -Lodosa and San Adrián-.

The Olite and Pitillas paintings are by the same hand and we have no doubt that they are works by the great Aragonese painter Francisco del Plano (1658 - 1739), who worked in outstanding Navarrese ensembles in the first decades of the 18th century. The Olite canvas was made along with two other paintings of Saints John and Saints Margaret and Agnes, for the parish of San Pedro in 1706. Its rich frames were carved by Andrés López and Bernardo de Izura in 1708.

In both cases, Olite and Pitillas, sample shows the saint kneeling with the padlock in his mouth, the palm with the three crowns, the shackles and a ring with its chain on the ground. San Ramón contemplates Christ placing the crown of thorns on him and the Virgin offering him the crown of roses, alluding to a mystical vision he experienced, preferring the crown of thorns (suffering) to that of flowers (award), which he seems to disdain. In the foreground, a pair of captives with the scapulars of Mercy are added, the one closest to the viewer, wearing a barretina. In the lower right part, in a small scene and under a large canopy -always present in the scenes of births to avoid drafts and colds to the parturients-, his birth is narrated, which gives the saint his nickname, for having extracted his body from the womb of his mother, already dead, practicing a lateral cesarean section. There we find the shrouded mother on a bed of high headboard, with large pillows, the viscount with the dagger that has served him to open laterally the womb of the already deceased mother, a midwife who picks up the child and a member of the clergy or perhaps doctor, with talar suit and large hat, with a gesture of admiration.

In the parish of Arellano, we find another canvas with the same general topic and the birth of the saint in a small scene in the lower part. Its chronology is not very different from the previous one, but aesthetically it is a work of a painter of lesser category and without the handling of color and the loose technique of the paintings of Olite and Pitillas. The foreground of the composition is occupied by the nobleman richly attired with red stockings and jacket of the same color, with handkerchief and cuffs of rich lace. sample the bloody knife. In the bed appears the deceased shrouded and on three pillows, on a bed with a rich headboard. The child appears on the mother's side and in the background a maid waits with a white linen to pick up the child. The whole has a great popular charm.

Finally, in the parish of Andosilla, we find a painting in the altarpiece of the much more popular saint, from the end of the 18th century. Without missing the canopy, the child appears on the bed, while three characters of difficult identification surround the bed.

The numerous textual sources that narrate the fact and other legendary events have been studied by Vicent Zuriaga. For the paintings we have seen, nothing better than to follow one of the hagiographies coeval with the paintings referred to above, that written at the beginning of the 18th century by Father Francisco Miguel Echeverz (1672-1745), a Mercedarian preacher and missionary, published in its third printing, in Pamplona in 1714.

The aforementioned author, after recounting the sudden fainting of the mother after having gone to mass, states: "The people around her came and seeing her almost breathless and without pulse, they took her home half dead. She came to her senses from fainting, only to die in the Lord and to prevent them from taking care of the child she was carrying in her womb, for having instructed those around her to open her to exhale so that the creature could receive the waters of baptism ...... All occupied with grief and weeping with this so unexpected and sensitive, they did not think of opening the deceased, as he left it in charge, but to give burial, and for this and to comfort the family, they sent for, as his kinsman, the Viscount of Cardona Don Ramon Folch, who was in one of his villages in that region. The viscount arrived, and having given his condolences to his relative for the death of his wife, he entered to commend to God, no doubt, where the corpse was and, noticing the numbness of the belly, said with great feeling: How is it that being this lady so far along in her pregnancy, they did not open her as soon as she died, that perhaps the child would have been found alive. Some excused themselves with the lack of an artificer who knew how to do it, others that they had not remembered. Then the viscount, reprimanding the carelessness and, undoubtedly moved by a superior impulse, took out his dagger and, tearing the belly of the corpse on one side, a tender little hand appeared through the wound, whose movements showed that the one who was lying on the corpse was still alive. They pulled it gently and it came out to the light. A child so beautiful that at the sight of him all the past weeping was turned into joy, the pain into rejoicing and the tears into happiness....". Father Echeverz then goes on to report the tradition that the event occurred, according to some, twenty-four hours after the mother's death, or three days later, according to others.

In this regard, we must remember that legislation, since the Code of Justinian in the 6th century, prescribed: Si mater in partu moritur, incidatur. Both from the theological point of view, as well as on the part of the Civil Law insisted on it, for different reasons.

As for the visual or engraved sources of these paintings, it is clear that they must have existed, although they do not appear in the repertoires of Mercedarian iconography. It is possible that they are loose prints, perhaps made on the occasion of their inclusion in the Roman Martyrology in 1657 or with the declaration of their feast day in 1681. Both circumstances must have been taken advantage of by the order to print commemorative plates in order to extend his cult, previously reserved only for the Mercedarians. Popular woodcuts and intaglio prints of the 18th century, such as the one by Agustí Sellent, as well as 19th century lithographs present the passage of the saint's birth in scenes of his life around his image, recalling the wundervita, or admirable lives, so abundant in the times of the Counter-Reformation.