The Museum of the Ways of the Gaudí Palace presents as ‘Piece of the Month’ a 17th century polychrome wood carving from Viloria representing the Infant Jesus. The image will be on display throughout the month of August in a prominent place on the second floor of the Gaudí Palace.
The cult of the Child Jesus began late in the Middle Ages. The scarce references to the infancy of Jesus in the Gospel texts and the little attention it received in primitive and medieval preaching meant that its representation in Christian art was late. As an isolated image it appears in the 16th century, a time when representations of the Divine Infant already abound.
This work responds to a singular iconography that possibly centered its development in the Hispanic area between the XVI and XVII centuries, present mainly in female cloisters.
A well resolved sculpture, well resolved, dressed in courtly attire typical of infants under seven years of age at the time, in an attitude of blessing with his right hand and holding the sphere crowned with the cross with his left, symbols of nobility and power. With kinky hair, the repainting of the face has distorted her expression and her small feet, wearing sandals, rest on a pedestal that shows a text that in its central part reproduces a liturgical phrase that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ: “Natus est nobis”, the rest being barely legible in the other profiles.
The Gaudí Palace can be visited from Monday to Sunday from 10:00 to 14:00 hours and in the afternoons from 16:00 to 20:00 hours.