Michelangelo Buonarroti

MIGUEL ANGEL BUONARROTI ( Caprese Michelangelo,1475 -Rome, 1564).
"Christ".
Gilded bronze and silver in purity cloth.
Measurements: 26 x 21 cm.
Francisco Pacheco was the first to write about these copies in Arte de la pintura, published posthumously in 1649. According to Pacheco, it was an Italian goldsmith based in Seville, whom he called Juan Bautista Franconio, who brought a bronze of 30 cm according to Michelangelo's model from Rome in 1597. Pacheco polychromed the first of the molds in 1600 and gave it as a gift to Pablo de Céspedes, prebendary of the Cathedral of Córdoba. What interested Pacheco most was that Michelangelo-Franconio's corpus perpetuated a vision of St. Bridget of Sweden, in which Jesus was nailed to the cross with four nails, with the left ankle rolled over the right, and that this devotional formation in turn influenced the great Sevillian Sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés.
The pure and resigned character of Christ recalls Michelangelo's early years, beginning with the wooden corpus in Santo Spirito, Florence, and the dead Christ in his painted Entombment (National Gallery of Art, London). In his old age, Michelangelo was more obsessed than ever with the challenge of conveying the divine love expressed by the crucified. The musculature was elaborated in a famous drawing in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which includes a transverse profile without a left arm.[9] Among the most elaborate drawings of Michelangelo's dead Christ, one in the Royal Collection at Windsor comes closest to our model. This model circulated mainly in Spain as mentioned above, both in bronze and silver, and it is debatable whether ours was made in Rome or in Spain.