Monument to Saint Francis Xavier

• Author: Faustino Aizkorbe.

• Materials and technique: Steel with greenish patina.

• Dimensions: Image: 530 cm; Pedestal: 172 x 151 x 151 cm.

• Location: Yamaguchi Park.

• Date of installation: 4 August 2006 (inauguration).

In 2006, Pamplona City Council joined in the commemoration of the 5th Centenary of the birth of Saint Francis Xavier (Javier, 1506-Sancián, 1552) with a sculpture reflecting his universal missionary work. The commission fell to the Navarrese sculptor Faustino Aizkorbe, author of various sculptures of the saint in Yamaguchi (Japan), Sancian (China), Goa (India) and in his own hometown. In all of them he moves away from the traditional image to provide a vision staffand at the same time contemporary, not exempt from spirituality, which he captures through the purity of the lines of the whole.

The sculpture of Saint Francis Xavier, cast in bronze and covered with a green patina, stands on a cubic pedestal. Despite its apparent non-figurative character, it is possible to discover in the image one of the most characteristic iconographies of the Apostle of the Indies, that of the ecstatic saint, with his gaze raised upwards and his cassock open at torso level to show his heart inflamed with divine love, as a reflection of the great avenues of consolation with which God rewarded his labours. The clarity of its forms, with their sure outlines and polished surfaces, give the work a personality of its own. Compositional sobriety, beauty and elegance of the design, and formal perfection in the treatment of the material are the dominant features of a sculpture to which, moreover, his research into the void and the findingof interior space is no stranger.