Virgin of the Sacred Heart

Canto da Maya, Ernesto1907/1944

Details

Title: Virgin of the Sacred Heart
Creator: Canto da Maya, Ernesto
Creator Lifespan: 1890/1981
Creator Gender: Male
Date: 1907/1944
Technique/Material: Terracotta (sgd)
Physical Dimensions: w19.6 x h51.2 x d29.1 cm (Without frame)
Exhibition: Caramulo, Portugal
Donated by:: The artist
Description: An artist with a long career in Paris, where, throughout the 1920s, he developed a taste for Art Déco that persisted in his memory and work, Canto da Maya was a sculptor of great elegance and inventiveness of form. In 1944, however, Canto da Maya exhibited at the S.P.N./S.N.I. a series of religious sculptures, determined by the painful tragedy of the death of his own son, who drowned in the seas of his native Azores. This work expresses the perfect continuity of his earlier work, insofar as it matches it in both a formal and mystical sense. Depicting the Virgin as a veiled woman, kneeling and barefoot, with her body being gently hinted at beneath her clothes whilst she holds the flaming Sacred Heart in an ecstasy of serene pathos, Canto da Maya highlights the fineness of his modelling through the use of a graphic stylisation that still contains certain suggestions of Art Déco, particularly evident in the motif of the wavy pleats that mark the rhythm of the veil and cloak.
Type: Sculpture
Rights: Museu do Caramulo

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