An engraved devotional portrait, printed on vellum, of Spanish Franciscan missionary and later Saint, Francisco Solano (1549-1610). He is depicted here holding a crucifix and accompanied by two Indigenous Peruvian figures, representing his missionary work in Tucumán, Lima and Trujillo – all part of the then colonial Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru – which is a traditional part of his iconography. Other depictions in print and paintings show him playing the violin, accompanied by a bull he is said to have tamed as a pet, or juxtaposed alongside St Francis of Assisi, his spiritual predecessor (Camere, p.218). While his image does appear in print and in paint in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have not found any other examples of his likeness used in small, private devotional talismans like this one.
Solano was born near Cordova in Spain, in 1549 and entered the Franciscan order at the age of twenty. Following twenty years of teaching and instruction at the local seminary, and having gained a reputation for his healing powers – particularly during a local outbreak of bubonic plague - in 1589 at the age of forty Solano made the long journey to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. He travelled to Peru via Cartagena, after a three-month sea voyage, then on to Panama, Lima and then 3000km to arrive in Tucumán, now in northern Argentina, in 1590. The first stage of his journey to Cartagena was made on a slave ship which was wrecked in a storm and sank, but suffered no losses. According to his hagiography he stayed with the enslaved prisoners on board, praying and converting them, and preventing their drowning.
On reaching dry land he conducted his evangelical work and established missions in Tucumán, Paraguay, Lima, and Trujillo to preach to growing communities of enslaved peoples and Indigenous labourers who worked the sugar mills on the Pacific coast there. He is reputed to have spoken many of the languages of the populations he encountered, and continued to work miracles, including correctly predicting the devastating earthquake that destroyed Trujillo in 1609, ten years before it happened. On his death, his burial site under the Franciscan church in Lima became a pilgrimage spot, and ‘the greatest sacred curing spot and apothecary of South America’ (Cañizares-Esguerra).
Solano was made a saint in 1726 by Pope Benedict XIII. That he is titled here ‘venerable Padre’ rather than Saint would suggest that this engraving was produced before his canonisation, and possibly even before his beatification in 1675. Where it was produced is uncertain. It may have been New Spain: Solano enjoyed immense popularity in the Americas both during his life and after his death, due in large part to the work of ‘his most distinguished hagiographer, Peruvian Creole Diego de Cordova Salinas’, according to whose writing ‘Solano was a new Francisco, and Lima a new Assisi’ (Cañizares-Esguerra). His image was much reproduced and featured in relicarios, popular particularly in the Spanish empire: devotional sculptures or images printed or painted on vellum (as here), alabaster, ivory or copper, and enclosed behind glass, or within a pendant. Indigenous workers were often involved in the production of these images.
The caption describes this image as a ‘verdadero retrato’. ’True portraits’ of recently deceased, canonised or holy individuals were a popular genre of devotional image in Imperial Spain, humanising saintly figures to foster devotion.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Singing Violin’, in M. Thurner & J. Pimentel (eds), New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities (UoL Press, 2021), pp.97-104. C. Camere, ‘Beyond the Bulls: The Life and Afterlives of St. Francisco Solano. Unravelling the First Canonisation Process in the New World’, unpubl. PhD thesis (School of Advanced Study, UoL, 2022 [open access]).
