BRINGING HERITAGE CLOSER. TUDELA

September 4, 2008

Art and devotion in Tudela in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries
D. Ricardo Fernández Gracia. Chair of Heritage and Navarrese Art.

An important issue of chapels of board of trustees, images, canvases and pieces of sumptuary arts of the centuries of the Ancient Regime, in Tudela, have reached our days, overcoming even the negative consequences of the nineteenth century disentailment. The application of the historical-artistic method in their study reveals to us the whole context in which they were conceived, as well as the reasons that led their promoters to commission certain artists, or to commission their projects outside the city's workshops.

As in other localities of the Hispanic world in those centuries, the arts closely followed the devotions in vogue, in tune with and at the service of the directives of the Church.

The Eucharist, with a late medieval precedent in the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, had an exceptional development both in the sixteenth century with the presence in some major altarpieces of the expository oculus of Aragonese filiation, as well as with the enlargement of the Corpus Christi procession. The arrival of the 17th century and the ideals of the Catholic Reformation brought as a consequence a greater Eucharistic cult with the presence of exuberant tabernacles to house rich monstrances and the establishment of festivities rooted in the city until the present, such as the feast of the Descent of the Angel on the morning of Easter Sunday, when the Risen Christ made Eucharist goes out to meeting of his Mother in the incomparable framework of the place Nueva. Three eighteenth-century texts relate in great detail this true sign of identity of the city over the centuries.

Together with the Eucharist, the affections of the people of Tudela, both in the official world and in the family and convent world, were directed towards the immaculist mystery, with the vow of the city in that sense in 1619 and the celebration of a tournament, unprecedented for its magnificence, held in 1620. Successive agreements of the Regiment and the collegiate Chapter complement and explain the outstanding immaculist paintings of Vicente Berdusán and others that arrived from New Spain, Italy or the Madrid Court.

In a climate of religious exaltation it is necessary to contextualize the presence of different Marian advocations in convents (Merced, Carmen, Rosario), as well as in the old parishes. Among the latter, there were two chapels dedicated to the Virgin of the Slavery -now disappeared- in San Juan, very sumptuous and decorated with large canvases by the Aragonese painter Pablo Rabiella -currently in San Jorge el Real-, and that of the Virgin of the Remedies, in San Nicolás, destroyed in the last decades, in spite of forming a delicate ensemble with paintings, plasterwork, tiles, etc., which could be carried out in the last decades, which could be carried out in the second quarter of the 18th century thanks to the munificence of its patrons: the noble Aperregui family.

The patrons of the parishes and convents also have outstanding representations that speak of high moments in the affections of their devotees or, simply, of healthy finances in the parish administrations. Particularly important in Tudela are some representations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in the old temple of the Jesuits, in the Capuchinas and in the Company of Mary, witnesses of a whole devotional and iconographic hype to which certain correspondence between the famous P. Hoyos and some Jesuits residing in Tudela in the middle of the XVIII century was not foreign.

The multiple representations of Saint Anne, to whose sponsorship the Regiment of the city was entrusted in 1530, as a result of a plague epidemic, as well as of other protecting and healing saints such as Saint Quiteria or Saint Babil, invoked against rabies or "against all pains", have representations that speak per se of social behaviors.

A review of the images of the Easter processions and the scarce testimonies of nativity scene art complete, if possible, the development of a festive calendar full of an important presence of the religious phenomenon, in a mostly illiterate society that used oral and plastic media as basic elements in the cultural and catechetical diffusion.

TEXTS
 

Juan Antonio Fernández, "Vista de la función del Ángel y Procesión con el Santísimo Sacramento en Tudela", c. a. 1787.