Attributed to ALONSO CANO (Granada, 1601 - 1667)."Saint Diego de Alcalá".Carved and polychrome wood.

Attributed to ALONSO CANO (Granada, 1601 - 1667).
"Saint Diego de Alcalá".
Carved and polychrome wood. Vitreous paste eyes.
Measurements: 62 x 23 x 18 cm.
This carving follows the same aesthetic precepts as the work carried out by Alonso Cano, of the religious Saint Diego, which currently belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada. Saint Diego de Alcalá (1400-1463), a Spanish Franciscan friar canonised by Pope Sixtus V in 1588, in the only canonisation carried out by the Catholic Church during the 16th century. Born at the end of the 14th century into a modest family in the small village of San Nicolás del Puerto, north of Seville, from his earliest youth Diego consecrated himself to the Lord as a hermit. Already dressed in the Franciscan habit, as a lay brother in the Order of Friars Minor of the Observance, he made numerous journeys, something rare for his time: he lived in the Canary Islands, Rome, Castile and Andalusia, and during his pilgrimage to Rome he visited various parts of Spain, France and Italy. He finally spent his last years in the convent of Santa María de Jesús in Alcalá de Henares, where he died in 1463. He was a very popular saint, patron saint of numerous localities, such as the city of California that bears his name. As a result, great artists treated his figure, as is the case of Lope de Vega, who dedicated a sonnet and a comedy to him. In the visual arts, he is depicted as a young beardless youth, despite the fact that he reached the age of sixty, with two iconographic attributes: a set of keys, for having been the convent's porter and cook, and the most important, some flowers that he picks in his habit, with both hands. This element alludes to one of the most popular episodes of his life, in which it is narrated that Diego was so generous with those who begged at the door of the convent that his superiors found it annoying and excessive. On one occasion they saw the saint wearing something in his habit, and were about to reprimand him when miraculously the bread rolls that Diego brought to the poor turned into roses.
Due to its formal characteristics, we can place this work in the circle of followers of Alonso Cano, a key painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Baroque. Cano was also the initiator of the Granada school of painting and sculpture, and his disciples included Juan de Sevilla, Pedro Atanasio Bocanegra, José Risueño, Pedro de Mena and José de Mora. The son of an important assembler of altarpieces and possibly also a draughtsman, Alonso Cano was introduced to architectural drawing and imagery by his father, with whom he collaborated from a very early age. In 1614 or 1615 he moved with his family to Seville, where he soon joined the painting workshop of Francisco Pacheco, then the most prestigious master in the city and Velázquez's de facto teacher, with whom Cano became a close friend. As a sculptor, he is traditionally considered to have trained with Juan Martínez Montañés, although there is no documentary evidence of this. As early as 1624 he signed his first known painting and two years later he qualified as a master painter. In 1638 he moved to Madrid and was soon appointed court painter and drawing teacher to Prince Baltasar Carlos. There he became acquainted with the royal collections, which led his language to evolve from its early Caravaggism towards a more colourful and elegant language, sometimes related to Van Dyck. However, in 1644 he was accused of murdering his wife, which led him to take refuge in Valencia. A year later he returned to Madrid, and in 1652 he returned permanently to Granada, where he obtained a post in the cathedral thanks to the influence of Philip IV. There he completed the decoration of the main chapel and became maestro mayor of the cathedral. Works by Alonso Cano are currently housed in the Prado Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan in New York, the J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago, etc.