Fiercely Mena

He puts his hand on his chest with the gesture of someone who opens his heart wide, of someone who is revealing a pure truth, an absolute dedication, an unconditional love.. The long hair snakes over the braided palm dress tied with a rope at the waist.. You can barely glimpse a small, delicate, almost adolescent body, too young for the sins that are charged in the file.. The mystical beauty of his face, perfection in the profiles that converge at the chin, is clothed with faith and devotion directed at the crucifix that he holds in his left hand..

Who would deny forgiveness to this daughter of the love of art?

The Penitent Magdalene by Pedro de Mena always forces me to deviate from the established path when it crosses my path in the middle of some documentary consultation. It is impossible to pass by and not be enraptured by it..

Today I have brought to these lines one of the crowning works of the Spanish Baroque to gloss the figure of one of the greatest artists that Andalusia contributes to the native Parnassus and to the heat of the Fieramente humano exhibition that is held at the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga and that you can enjoy until February 18 of next year. In this exhibition you have the opportunity to see two works by Mena, an Ecce Homo and a Dolorosa, which are trademarks of the house.. From the Mena house.

Pedro was born in 1628 in Granada and was born into a family with wood shavings in the book of idem. The Roldán and the Mora were surnames known and treated in the house.. Inbreeding of gouges and rasps. Pedro's native Granada was, along with Seville, the other great focus that illuminated Andalusian arts in the Golden Age.. Alonso Cano, that Granada-style Buonarotti with a strange character and dark past, arrived there in 1652 to take charge as rationer of the Granada Cathedral and our Pedro collaborated with him, taking the idealized aesthetics from the master, but creating a very personal naturalistic style that It brings you closer to the raw truths of the boatman, those of sacrifice, penance and martyrdom of Christian models that should serve as an example and object of imitation for our sinful souls..

A style that will evolve in Malaga, where he arrives at the age of twenty-nine and finds the opportunity to demonstrate his talent after the Cathedral Chapter commissioned him to finish the choir stalls, a work extended over time by different events and with the intervention of different people. hands, although Mena's would be the most decisive in the final result: forty-two high reliefs in which Pedro shows his evolution as an artist, from the initial influence of Cano to the formation of his own and unmistakable artistic language.

A path that the artist travels and that leads him to leave Andalusia, leaving examples of his mastery in Toledo, with the portentous Saint Francis of Assisi of the primate cathedral, I doubt that he will not breathe and look at me again, and in Madrid , in the school of the Congregation of Jesus for whom he made the ineffable Magdalena Penitente and which can be experienced today, because there are works of art to be experienced, in the National Museum of Valladolid. This would not be the only collaboration with the Jesuits.

In the Sevillian baroque reliquary of San Luis de los Franceses, the Jesuit novitiate church shores up the pillars of any faltering faith. In the attic of the small altarpiece dedicated to San Luis Gonzaga, an extraordinary carving by Duque Cornejo, an Ecce Homo reveals the presence of Pedro de Mena in the complex. The lock of hair that winds, the purity of lines, the delicate profiles, the blood tracing the map of the sacrifice, the gaze above, far from this world, passing through the lantern of the imposing dome of Figueroa and reaching the Father. It is paired, as was usual in its tremendously demanded production, with a bust of Dolorosa that repeats the same aesthetic language..

His application for the position of chamber sculptor was not accepted; he had plenty of gallons for it, but he enjoyed prestige and recognition in life and that, in the 17th century and in the 21st, equips self-esteem and is a sought-after value..

Pedro de Mena died in his adopted city, in Malaga, and by his own decision he was buried in the floor of the entrance to the church of the Císter Convent, where his daughters Juana, Claudia and Andrea, the last two, sculptors like their father, professed. father. Pedro arranged to be accompanied in his final resting place by a couple of Ecce Homo and Dolorosa that he himself made expressly, but there are wishes that history insists on not fulfilling..

On two gray exhibitors at the Carmen Thyssen Museum, rest the busts of those who had to watch over the eternal dream of the fiercely human, fiercely baroque, fiercely Mena artist.