All belenistas are familiar with the name of Luisa Roldán, known as La Roldana, the 17th/18th century court sculptor. The daughter of the Sevilla sculptor Pedro Roldán, she was born in 1652. She married a young apprentice from her father’s workshop, Luis Antonio de los Arcos, and eventually moved to Madrid. She was appointed a court sculptor by Carlos II in 1661, and continued in the position under Felipe V, dying in 1706. While the position gave her honor, it was not very lucrative, and just before her death she was forced to make a “declaración de pobreza,” basically a declaration of bankruptcy. She created many large wooden figures, but belenistas are probably most familiar with her charming painted terracotta figures of the Holy Family, the Infancy of Christ and related subjects. This photo, taken from a website on a 2007 exhibition of her work in Spain, shows the Child Jesus and St. John the Baptist as a child, playing and surrounded by cherubim.
Now her work is the subject of an exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Entitled La Roldana’s San Ginés: The Making of a Polychrome Sculpture, it examines one of her large works, a statue of San Gines de la Jara, probably created while she was court sculptor. Particularly interesting are the explanations of certain techniques common in Baroque Spanish sculpture: estofado, which was the paint and scratch technique used to create the elaborate gold patterns on garments, and the encarnaciones, the painting of flesh-colored parts of the statue, such as the hands or face.
I hope to visit the exhibition on a trip to California later this year, but in the meantime, I found that the Getty’s web pages were almost as good as a visit. They provide detailed information on the exhibition and the technical subjects under discussion. Don’t miss the excellent video that is on the exhibition website…if one picture is worth a thousand words, I can’t imagine how many words one well-made video is worth!
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