Provenance:

Private Collection, Paraguay, for at least the last 80 years.

Painted in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the 18th century, the present work depicts the young Christ as the Niño de la Espina—a devotional representation of Christ as he looks down at his bleeding finger, which has been pricked by the crown of thorns resting on his lap. The subject of the Young Christ Pricked by a Thorn was especially popular in Cuzco, and the rich details and decorative elements of our work perfectly capture the essence and style of the Cuzco School of painting. 

In our painting, Christ wears an intricately patterned floor-length robe trimmed with gilded cuffs and a gilded collar. The delicate gilding, including the halo of golden rays emanating from his head, are executed in brocateado, an ornamental over-gilding technique that is characteristic of the Cuzco School. The red chair on which Christ sits also includes brocateado in the decorative gilt elements. The form of the chair takes inspiration from those commonly used by friars both in Spain and the Andes, known as silla frailera or sillon frailero, and was also frequently employed in related depictions of the Virgin Mary Spinning. Here the young Christ is rendered with soft, elongated features that reflect the influence of the Italian Mannerist painters who were pivotal to the formation of the Cuzco School, including the Jesuit friar Bernardo Bitti and Matteo Pérez del Alesio. Additionally, while its origins can be traced to Northern European pictorial traditions, the lush flower garland that frames the work is a signature feature of Cuzqueño painting. While most of the flowers cannot be identified, several of the fruits included are Christological symbols, including the pomegranate in the lower left and the grapes in the upper left and right. Fascinatingly, the garland also includes in the upper left corner a bunch of strawberries—a fruit that was cultivated by the indigenous populations of the Americas long before the arrival of the Spanish.

The apocryphal narrative of the young Christ pricked by a thorn originated from Ludolf of Saxony’s 14th-century collection of meditations on Christ’s life, the Speculum vitae Christi (or Mirror of the Life of Christ). The text relates a story of Christ’s childhood in which he pricks his finger while weaving crowns from thorny branches—an act that was both a premonition and a mirror of the Passion and Christ’s future suffering. Pictorial representations of the Christ Child pricked by a thorn found their first flourishing in Spain in the 17th century, with notable representations of the subject painted by significant artists of the day, including Francisco de Zurbarán (Fig. 1). The iconography eventually traveled across the Atlantic to the Americas, where it became a popular devotional subject, particularly in Peru. The artists of the Cuzco school breathed new life into the subject, treating it with their distinctive local style while also transforming the iconography. Images of the young Christ with a thorn frequently became paired with images of the Virgin Mary spinning wool (Fig. 2), another widespread devotional subject in Sevillian painting, which had remained unlinked to the present subject until their arrival in the Americas.