The Library Services Nacional de Madrid conserves a drawing by Santiago Marsili, which has been included among those who have studied the personality of its author, although it had not been accurately dated or identified as belonging to an unrealized project for the parish of Santa Eufemia de Villafranca. The piece is included in the monograph on drawing in Navarre, published by the Publishing Services of the University of Navarre, with the sponsorship of the Fuentes Dutor Foundation. The plan and elevation drawing not only shows what was intended to be done by reforming the old altarpiece, but also what the latter work looked like, to the left and right respectively.

The request to the bishopric of Pamplona, on the part of those in charge of the parish, was for Vicente Frías, a master sculptor residing in Caparroso, to do it for the amount of 2,200 ducats. However, the person who gave the approval and wrote a report on the project, in 1730, was the discalced Carmelite friar José de los Santos who, at that time, resided in Corella. The religious was of the opinion that it was necessary to enrich the design with angels, whips and bichas in the pedestal and numerous adornments in the main niche with birds and vegetable ornaments, as well as a pavilion. Likewise, he was of the opinion that an expository tabernacle should be made like the one in the parish of Falces (1700-1702), which was considered "the most exquisite in the whole area". Not in vain, the Falces work was the work of the famous Francisco Gurrea, considered in his time as the best official of the kingdom. In May 1730, Vicente Frías accepted the conditions added by Fray José de los Santos and the deed was signed.

Frías received various amounts between 1733 and 1744. The 1744-1745 accounts include the arrival of the sculptor Diego de Camporredondo from Calahorra for the submission of the work. The other appraiser was the master from Tudela, Baltasar de Gambarte, who received 12 ducats for his work in 1745.

We know that altarpiece, which came out of the Castilian tradition, through the drawing that is preserved in the National Library Services , specifically on the right side. The piece was of enormous size and remained unpolychromed. It obeyed the characteristics of the casticismo and was contemporary to other sets of the Ribera like those of the old high school of the Company of Jesus of Tudela, work of the brothers of the River. With a moving floor plan and very high proportions, it consisted of a plinth, average cane, a high order of Corinthian columns articulating a single tetrastyle body and a shell attic with stipes and salomonic columns. The central street stood out for its proportions, as well as for being advanced with respect to the lateral ones, which are clearly recessed, in the style and manner that had been imposed in altarpieces of the first decades of that century in Recoletas de Pamplona or Mendigaña de Azcona. Very typical of the Tudela workshop was the average cane with a kind of jardinière full of ornament and foliage, as well as the stipes of the attic, rarely used in these lands. A very developed piece was the expositor, in the style of the one in Cárcar and other altarpieces from the Tudela workshop. Otherwise, the absolute protagonist of the piece was the ornament, which invaded everything.

In 1782, when barely forty years had passed since the construction of the main altarpiece, the board of trustees of that temple considered it appropriate to eliminate its baroque style, no doubt influenced by the new aesthetic currents and by some neighbors living in Madrid. That decade of the eighties was the decade of the visit of Don Francisco Ponz, secretary of the Academy of San Fernando, to Pamplona where he denounced the Baroque interiors of the city. The year of that visit, marked a turning point both for the development of the arts and for the fall of the all-powerful guilds that until then had held the production process of altarpieces and works of architecture, always for the benefit of everything that had the approval of the Royal Academy, used by the power to impose the academic aesthetics.

The first steps for the reform of the altarpiece were taken with Miguel Zufía and Juan de Angós, who reported with a long letter in their capacity as "master architects and sculptors", judging that "they are currently in a dissonant and imperfect disposition to the rest of the church". At the end of 1782, the aforementioned Angós sent a letter from Borja giving an account of what was being done in the collegiate church of that Aragonese city by Diego Díaz del Valle, assisted by Santiago Marsili "master sculptor, architect and accredited carver in those Schools, neighbor of the town of Peralta".

The first news concerning Marsili's design is a letter from the aforementioned Angós to Felipe Spanish, presbyter and proxy of the parish board of trustees , dated May 1783, in which he reports having received the drawing, objecting to some details.

If we follow the drawing, what Marsili proposed was the elimination of the superfluous vegetal foliage in the different parts of the piece, in the lower parts, removing ornamentation and replacing it with marbling in the base and with epithets of the litany of Lauretana in the area of the average reed. The rich corbels, with holding angels, would come to house sculptural reliefs and in the body, besides the general shaving, the suggestion of the main altarpiece of Peralta, work of José Ramírez (1766-1771) is a fact both for the subject of columns with the lower third grooved and the rest smooth with garlands, as for the placement of the supports of sculptures. The attic also presents a total transformation, with the suppression of stipes and dressed salomonic, as well as the surfaces full of vegetation and replaced by a framed relief, garlands and powerful coffers, without lacking the glory of Berninesque ancestry so dear to the altarpieces of the late Baroque.

In October of that same year, Cristóbal Salesa, Borja's sculptor, gave a very negative, and even derogatory, judgment on the design that was sent to him, while offering to draw up a new plan, for which work would not charge anything if he was commissioned to do the work or if the Royal Academy of San Fernando disapproved it. In a long lawsuit filed by Salesa we can read all subject of arguments to try to have the altarpiece awarded to him, constituting a perfect example of how the supernumerary academicians, supported by the royal legislation and the Academy, tried at all costs to impose the new forms. In them he alludes to the King's circular of 1778, in which he ordered to send the projects to be carried out to the Academy and to the Royal Pragmatic of 1782 on the dignification of the Fine Arts and their separation from the mechanical arts.

For reasons that we have not been able to find out, very possibly because of the lawsuit brought by Cristóbal Salesa, the altarpiece was not contracted until 1786, when the aforementioned Marsili and the gilders Juan José del Rey Matías Garrido were made position of the work. The plan had the opinions of Diego Díaz del Valle and the aforementioned Juan Angós, and even of Fray Manuel Ortega, who resided in the convent of Alfaro and directed the construction of the main altarpiece of the Franciscans of Olite. The new altarpiece (1786-1789) no longer conformed to the left side of the design preserved in the Library Services Nacional. The three years that elapsed were few, but enough for the new altarpiece to no longer be late baroque, but decidedly neoclassical.

In spite of everything, Cristóbal Salesa continued to fight. In the allegations of his attorney, dated 1788 and 1789, we can read all subject arguments to try to be awarded the altarpiece. Among the documents he provided were letters from the secretary of the Academy, Antonio Ponz, dated in Madrid on June 1, 1784 and August 31, 1789, in which he certified that those of Villafranca had not sent him project signed by Salesa. His allegations are a perfect example of how all these supernumerary academicians, supported by the royal legislation and the Academy, tried at all costs to impose the new forms. In them he alludes to the King's circular of 1778 in which the projects to be carried out were ordered to be sent to the Academy and to the Royal Pragmatic of 1782 for the dignification of the Fine Arts and their separation from the mechanical arts.

Salesa must have seen the altarpiece already made, judging it as a "monstrous work , since the head weighs much more than the whole body". For him, this was not the only nonsense carried out in these lands that "the same has happened in many other works in Navarra, approving the designs by people who ignore the rudiments of art, as well as the design for the organ of Lodosa, design that would be ugly drawn by the children of the school, C by José Muguiro, master assembler examined in this city, titling himself sculptor and statuary, when he has not known in his life the art of statuary, being .... of view appointed by the Court from which follow so many repeated annoying litigations that will be avoided by observing the wise providences of the Sovereign and the works would have the estimation". If Salesa had been hard on the Navarrese artists and those of Villafranca and their behavior, the board of trustees of this town was not far behind, judging Salesa's comments on the royal orders thus: "they only deserve contempt, because they only aim to have the altarpiece destroyed and reshaped as they please, to denigrate the Court, the board of trustees andthe masters of the Country because they do not have the pompous and glittering degree scroll of academics, as if this lent some skill more to the subject than that which by itself it possesses".

Santiago Marsili or Marsilly was a very active master in Guipúzcoa, Navarre and Aragon throughout the last decades of the 18th century who has been pointed out as being of Italian origin. His first documented works place him in Guipúzcoa, between 1766 and 1780, with residency program there. From the beginning of the eighties and until his death in 1791, he lived in Peralta and Villafranca, in Navarre.

M. I. Astiazarain, I. Cendoya and J. Zorrozua have dealt with his activity in Guipúzcoa (Tolosa, Adoain, Amasa, Ataun and Abalcisqueta), and B. Boloqui Larraya with his work in Borja (1792-1783).

Referred to in some documents as a santero, he was a sculptor and architect. At the end of 1782 he is called in the documentation as "master sculptor, architect and carver accredited in those Schools". In his sculptures, the expressive and complicated folding, foreign to that of the masters of those decades of the Age of Enlightenment, took on special prominence.

Regarding his work in Navarre, the first commission he received was the "giralda" for Mendigorría in 1780, which is a human or animal figure to finish off the tower, a piece that has not been preserved and that was to be a magnificent colophon for that bell tower, completed in 1776.

In 1782 he appraised the Holy Thursday monument of Peralta and made position of the missing pulpits of the parish of Falces and the following year, in 1783, agreement is documented for the realization of the monumental organ case of the parish of Peralta, greatly transformed when mounted in the new nineteenth-century parish, but retains its towers and, above all, some beautiful anthropomorphic supports.

In 1783 he signed the project for the remodeling of the main altarpiece in Villafranca. From Villafranca, where he died in 1791, he attended to different commissions. In 1785, he contracted the San Adrián stalls for the amount of 500 pesos de a ocho reales. For Marcilla, he worked on some packages between 1786 and 1787 and for Valtierra, he was commissioned in 1790 to make an image of Christ for the Descent from the Cross, which has been preserved.

Up to the present and following the contributions of those who studied his work in Guipúzcoa, Santiago Marsili has been considered an Italian master. However, his will is clear in this regard, by stating his origin on two occasions. First, he affirms that he was a native of Bayonne and, later, when mentioning relatives, he mentions his brother, resident in the kingdom of France. With this precise information, therefore, the whole chapter of his training is open, which, at least in its first phase, must have been carried out in his country.