The image of Saint Teresa in the Discalced Carmelite nuns

The titular sculpture of its altarpiece in the convent church of the Carmelites of San José of Pamplona is the one that presided in the old temple of the place del Castillo the chapel of its invocation, paid by Don Álvaro de Benavides, brother of the viceroy of Navarre, between 1653 and 1661, occupying the priory of the convent the Mother Mariana del Espíritu Santo. The missing altarpiece was contracted by Miguel Martínez de Heredia, secretary of the Holy Crusade and the master architect of Pamplona Martín de Legarra, under the supervision of the discalced Carmelite friar Martín de San José, in 1682.

The image, which was saved from the total destruction of the old convent, follows the model popularized by Gregorio Fernández, and undoubtedly comes from workshops in Valladolid, from where not only the Carmelites imported works, but also other orders such as the Jesuits who did the same with some heads of saints, the Immaculate Conception and some other Marian images. When it was installed in the new altarpiece, in its present location, it was completely repainted, having lost much of its seismic character.

In fact, the model of the saint standing, as an ecstatic writer and inspired by the Paraclete, with the habits of the barefoot, is invariably repeated in Navarre, from the first examples of the Valladolid school found in the Carmelite convents (Corella, Pamplona and Tudela -today in the parish of Murchante-), the eighteenth-century ones of Corella, Fitero or Santesteban and the last ones of academic orbit in these lands, like the relief of the altarpiece of Irurita, work of Alfonso Giraldo Bergaz (c. 1770).1770).