Saint John the Baptist

During the first decades of the seventeenth century, the presence in Lima of several Sevillian sculptors was key to the formation of a local tradition of statuary in polychrome wood, the preferred genre of Spanish sculpture. The work of craftsmen like Martín de Oviedo, Martín Alonso de Mesa, Gaspar de la Cueva, Pedro de Noguera and Luis Ortiz de Vargas contributed to the defining of artistic taste in Lima, which was closely associated with the Sevillian model. At the same time, the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru had been transformed into one of the main centers in the Americas for the importation of Sevillian sculpture, and it was thus that several works by Juan Martínez de Montañés and other important artists from his circle arrived in Peru. This Saint John the Baptist is a good example of that Sevillian school, and Montañés’ style in particular. According to the art historian Francisco Stastny, this model was expressed for the first time in 1623 by Juan de Mesa, a disciple of Martínez de Montañés, in a work now conserved in Seville’s Museum of Fine Arts. The piece’s facture, however, would seem to point rather to a local workshop.