Granada School; XVIII century.

Granada School; XVIII century.
"Immaculate Conception.
Carved and polychrome wood with vitreous paste eyes.
Presents faults and restorations.
Measurements: 43 x 16 cm.
Round carving representing the Virgin in her invocation of Immaculate Conception. Mary is shown standing on cherub heads from which the peaks of the lunar crescent emerge. Dressed in a white tunic and with a blue mantle edged in gold, she joins her hands in prayerful attitude, which prints a naturalistic game of folds to the mantle. Her hair falls loosely down her back, and the features of her fine face and long neck give her a remarkable elegance, stylizing her bearing. Stylistically, it is inserted in the Granadian baroque, which can be appreciated not only in the iconography, but also in the model chosen as an influence for it, in the decoration of the clothes, in the coloring, in the features of the face, etc.
The dogma of the Immaculate holds that Mary was conceived without Original Sin and was officially proclaimed by the bull Ineffabilis Deus in 1854, although Spain and its territories already defended it for centuries before. Its iconography combines the apocalyptic passage of the "woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars" with the Lauretan Litany, whose Marian epithets come in part from the Song of Songs. From these texts and from an evolution that began at the end of the Gothic period, a clear model is consolidated: young Mary, on the lunar quarter, with the stars on her head, wrapped in light, normally dressed in white and blue as symbols of purity and eternity (or in red and blue in relation to the Passion), and with her hands folded on her chest.